The Restart Project Podcast

In our first radio show of 2018, we cover a range of topics: from learning about modularity through flatpack electronics, to the recent Apple battery scandal, to the even more recent news concerning Spectre and Meltdown: two recently discovered flaws that mean owners of electronic products everywhere are facing major vulnerabilities. Ugo and Restarter Panda Méry are joined by Janet to discuss the use of kit-style electronics as educational materials, in schools and in the home. Building on the legacy of LEGO and other building games, the idea of teaching electronic repair and design early on is starting to catch on. As a complement to the surge in programmes that seek to teach kids how to code, products such as Kano and Pi-top also aim to demonstrate the worth of understanding how hardware works. There are differences in the way we engage with items we have built ourselves, which is evident across a wide range of ages. Products that come as a kit that must be constructed help us to understand the benefits of modularity, as well as encouraging life-cycle thinking that places each product within a broader social and environmental context. And Kano has shown real attention to this, in providing a reuse project for its “obsolete” first generation. The sense of ownership and control that we gain from building things ourselves stands in sharp contrast to some of the current models of electronic gadgets, where users feel locked out of the knowledge they need to use their products effectively. This has been highlighted by the recent scandal concerning Apple’s admission that it has released updates that purposely slow down the iPhone 6 when its battery is wearing down. As Panda explains, the problem is not with the updates themselves, which in fact do extend the usability of phones that might otherwise shut down. Instead, it is a problem of transparency, communication and trust, which points to the need for manufacturers to involve users in the repair and maintenance of their gadgets. Finally, we touch briefly on Spectre and Meltdown, two major flaws affecting processors (CPUs) that have recently come to light. They affect nearly all computer products and operating systems made in the last 20 years, and as yet, no fully effective fix has been discovered. We suggest that all smartphone and computer users should update their browsers and operating systems as soon as possible to minimise vulnerability. Links: Technology Will Save Us Pi-Top Kano Lomography Konstruktor DIY camera The Repairable Flatpack Toaster (only a concept) NY Times: Is Apple Slowing Down Old iPhones? Questions and Answers The Hacker News: How to protect your devices against Spectre and Meltdown Attacks [Photo “Kano Computer Kit with Raspberry Pi 3” by Adafruit Industries is licensed under CC BY-NC-SA 2.0] The post Restart Radio: Flatpack electronics plus battery and CPU failures appeared first on The Restart Project.

The soaring value of Bitcoin has been all over the media recently. But what is Bitcoin, and – more importantly to us – what is the environmental cost of ‘mining’ it? Bitcoin is the largest of a series of emerging ‘cryptocurrencies’ – forms of digital currency that operate by way of decentralized networks. Because users are not identified by their name, but instead by their ‘public key’, they originally attracted media attention as a means of conducting illegal business. Now, however, the enormous profit made by those who invested at Bitcoin’s birth has drawn in more mainstream attention. What makes cryptocurrency distinct from other banking systems is that it uses ‘peer to peer’ transactions, which are validated by the community, rather than by a central body. The technology behind it is the ‘Blockchain’ – which is essentially a public ledger of all transactions ever made. Sets of transactions are validated in ‘blocks’, and then added to the chain. The process of mining new bitcoin is actually the process of validating blocks of transactions, which requires miners – or groups of miners – to compete to solve a complex mathematical problem. When the problem is solved, the winning miner is rewarded with bitcoin, and the block is added to the blockchain. The intensely complicated system by which Bitcoin works has meant that the discussion surrounding it has tended to be dominated by those who understand it: usually, this means investors. But the growing phenomenon of cryptocurrencies is not just relevant to people who have bought bitcoin – it is relevant to all of us. At Restart, we’re interested in the environmental impact of technological systems – including those that are all but invisible. The internet, for example, is something that people rarely think of as having any material reality. But as we explored in a previous podcast episode, the data centres that power the internet involve huge amounts of hardware that require large amounts of energy to both manufacture and to power. Bitcoin, far from being an immaterial currency, has a real environmental footprint. This is because huge amounts of energy are required to solve the complex mathematical problems in order for miners to add a block of transactions to the blockchain. It is based on probability, so the larger the number of computers working at it at once, the more chance the miners have of “winning” Bitcoin. As Bitcoins value increases, so does the difficulty of this problem, and so does the energy that is being poured into solving it. The very language used to describe Bitcoin – involving ‘blocks’ and ‘miners’ – points to the real material processes that underpin its highly unpredictable operating processes. There are many estimates floating around about the total environmental impact of the entire Bitcoin network – some say that it is as great as the entire country of Denmark, and set to increase. Not to mention other cryptocurrencies, such as Ethereum, which are using similarly ludicrous amounts of power. Like traditional internet data centres, these mines also require huge amounts of energy to cool, and equipment is discarded often in favour of newer models with higher processing power. Estimates about their energy consumption, then, must also be considered in light of their embodied impact: the resources going into manufacturing the hardware itself. Some supporters of Bitcoin praise it as a disruptive technology with the potential to undermine the banking systems that have come increasingly under scrutiny. But we wonder whether its decentralised format is destined to remain that way. The fact that these networks are dependent on such large amounts of power may result in their increased centralization, as more and more mines crop up in areas where electricity is cheap and abundant. And while some projects aim to address Bitcoin’s power consumption by using renewables, lots of mining facilities are powered by energy coming from fossil fuels. Last but not least, we also wonder whether the mathematical problems that need solving for mining bitcoins could be more “useful”, by addressing real computing needs. Blockchain technology undoubtedly has many applications beyond cryptocurrencies. Like any technology, it is neither inherently ‘good’, nor ‘bad’. It depends on how we use it. We will continue to examine this topic as it unfolds, remembering that there is no such thing as an immaterial technology, and that everything comes at a cost. Links: Brett Scott: how to explain Bitcoin to your grandmother The Restart Podcast Ep. 22: Greening the Internet Motherboard: Bitcoin could consume as much energy as Denmark by 2020 Grist: Bitcoin could consume as much energy as the entire world by 2020  Quartz: The largest Bitcoin mine in the world  The Register: Scarbucks wifi customers taken advantage of to mine alt-coins  Wired: The Hard Math behind Bitcoins Global Warming Problem [Feature image “Bitcoin” by Flickr user Stock Catalogue is licensed under CC-BY 2.0.] The post Restart Radio: What does Bitcoin mining mean for the environment? appeared first on The Restart Project.

In the lead up to Christmas, commuters around London are being bombarded with advertisements for voice-controlled home assistants – in particular the Amazon Echo. Today, we talk about the business model behind the device, our concerns about the rate of its sales, and the questions that the Echo raises about who benefits in the future of machine learning. The Amazon Echo bears many similarities to its main competitor, the Google Home. Both respond to a ‘wake’ word – which in the case of the Echo, is set by default to ‘Alexa’, a female-voiced assistant who acts as a search engine, can purchase items for you, add items to your calendar, and send commands to other ‘smart’ or connected devices. Having been a popular item in the US for a couple of years, Amazon brought the Echo (and the newer, smaller Dot) to the UK market last year, but it’s now pushing it with season-specific advertising. With the voice-controlled speaker system recently made available for purchase in over 80 new countries around the world including in India, the number of Echos in homes is set to increase. Amazon has built an open platform for developers: anyone can create a ‘skill’ for Alexa to be distributed via Amazon. The result of this is that Alexa now has over 15,000 ‘skills’ (which can range from turning on your central heating system to finding the ‘perfect christmas playlist’). Unlike Apple products, where the software platform is inextricably tied to the hardware, hardware developers can harness the power of Amazon’s platform. As just a vessel for Amazon’s software, the hardware itself loses apparent value, and we wonder how many of these speakers will be soon discarded in favour of a new model. Like the Amazon Kindle, the Amazon voice-controlled assistants are suspiciously cheap. This rings alarm bells for several reasons, and not just because it tends to demotivate repair. We’ve learned that as a rule of thumb on the internet, when you’re not paying (much) for the product, you are the product. Consumers of voice controlled assistants are paying, in part, with their voices. In order for voice recognition to work with different intonations and accents, manufacturers need a huge database of voices and to employ ‘deep learning’ techniques. These are expensive and time-consuming. But with Echos distributed all over the world, Amazon doesn’t have to collect voices – Alexa does it for them. Another more troubling implication of this business model is that Amazon – and Google, with its personal assistants both on mobile and the home – are collecting vast amounts of data from consumers. While you can configure these devices to some degree, for them to be effective, personal assistants are always listening. What will this data be used for? Personal assistants grow ‘smarter’ as they collect information about their users – but it’s actually the companies that own the platforms that have the most to learn. While we may feel like we are in a position of control when we give commands such as ‘Alexa, add mince pies to my shopping list’, are we in fact relinquishing control with every tidbit of data on our interests, habits and personal lives that is sent up into the cloud? Beyond personal data, what will be the consequence of a handful of large companies possessing so much more data and using AI to learn about behaviour of people, predicting wants and desires? We discuss some open source alternatives – including Mycroft and Mozilla’s Common Voice – with greater transparency and data protection. We’ll be closely following this topic as it develops: voice-controlled assistants are undoubtedly useful for many things, but we need to make sure that we are active participants in shaping the kind of future that we want to live in. Links: BBC: Amazon Echos activated by TV comment  Venturebeat: Echo released in more than 80 countries worldwide Restart Podcast Ep 18: Gendered gadgets Wired: Voice is the next big platform, unless you have an accent Mozilla: Project Common Voice  Mycroft: Open source artificial intelligence for everyone [Feature Image “Amazon Echo” by Flickr user Cryptik Merlin is licensed under CC BY-NC-ND 2.0] The post Restart Radio: Voice-controlled Assistants and “Smart Speakers” appeared first on The Restart Project.

You can tell a lot about a person from their data: from the places they go, to the length of their work-out, to their preferred breakfast cereal. And with this amount of private information stored inside an iPhone or a computer, it isn’t surprising that people are unwilling to hand them over to a recycler once they’re no longer in-use. But is this a valid concern, considering that we hand this information over willfully, all the time, to large corporations for whom it is a valuable currency? A study by REPIC, the UK’s biggest producer compliance scheme for e-waste, showed that 65% of users of electronic items have concerns about their data being breached. Of these, more than a quarter didn’t know how to delete their data, while a third didn’t think they had to. Evidently, education surrounding personal data and how to manage it hasn’t caught up to the large role it plays in the lives of most people. This isn’t just problematic for its implications to e-waste.  It also raises the question of whether we really are willing participants in the Big Data economy. Today, Ugo and Neil talk about the ethics of personal data collection with reference to The Glass Room: a pop-up interactive exhibition that we visited last month in London, produced by Mozilla and curated by Tactical Tech. The Glass Room aims to educate people about how their data is being monitored through location services, search histories, health information from synced products like Fitbit trackers, likes, messages, and even the exact amount of time in which your attention span is held by a certain article. While Glass Room is now closed in London, their website offers access to a wide selection of the materials presented in the exhibition, including inspiring videos and installations, challenging our understanding of how much we’re being tracked and the extent to which privacy is under threat. Image source: https://theglassroom.org/exhibit/ But why should you care? Even if you are not concerned with ways in which your data (or the profit generated by it) is used by corporations such as Alphabet – the multinational conglomerate that claims Google as one of its subsidiaries – then the thought of how it might be used illegally by those who successfully breach these enormous stores of data is a terrifying enough thought on its own. There are ways to take back some control over the information you hand out. Experts at the Glass Room’s ‘Ingenious bar’ handed out Data Detox Kits, which spell out an 8-day plan to help users seek to understand and reclaim the online portrait built up from their data. Ugo and Neil brainstorm some of their own techniques. Duck Duck Go is a search engine which does not track users, and Firefox Focus in a new version of Mozilla’s browser for mobile phones, which makes it very easy to delete traces of what you have searched, while taking little memory. If you do need to continue using services such as Google and Facebook, check out your privacy settings so you know what information is being shared. With the rise of the Internet of Things, the environmental and social cost of Big Data is only going to grow. If we are to have a truly democratic society founded on trust and openness, the circumstances surrounding collection and usage of personal data need to be made far more transparent. Links: CIWM – REPIC study on data security fears and recycling The Glass Room  Data Detox Kit – Online Version Joana Moll – The Texas Border CHOICE Australia – Actor hired to read all of Amazon’s Terms and Conditions  Duck Duck Go Firefox Focus The post Restart Radio: Exploring personal data at the Glass Room appeared first on The Restart Project.

Lewis Dartnell, fellow of astrobiology at the University of Leicester, asked himself a difficult question. If tomorrow we woke up and all the technologies we had come to depend on had ceased to exist, what knowledge would we need to re-build them from scratch? The book that came out of his research, called ‘The Knowledge: How to Rebuild our World from Scratch’, explores the history and inner workings of many of the facets of our modern society. Using the idea of a ‘technological apocalypse’ as a thought experiment, it forces us to consider our dependence on the systems and technologies that we take for granted every day. When we invited Lewis to come and talk at the first Fixfest at LSE in October this year, he raised the important point that knowledge has become highly specialised. Given the number of people that are involved in the various stages of production of any single item, from the design, to the mining of the raw minerals used, to the assembly, a repairer seeking to understand that item must be multi-skilled, curious, and eager to learn. In this interview, Lewis talks to us about how people might be inspired to become more curious in the world around them. We also put Lewis’ thought experiment to members of our community at a recent Restart Party in Tower Hamlets. While some seemed to be thrilled at the idea of a world without computers, for others, the prospect was panic-inducing. Imagining the unimaginable raises important questions about the real problems facing our word today. Would we want to recreate the world exactly as it is? What would we change, and how would we change it? You can also watch or listen to Lewis’ Fixfest keynote on our Youtube channel. Links: Lewis Dartnell The Knowledge [feature image by Paul Stuart] The post Restart Podcast Ep. 27: How to Restart the World with Lewis Dartnell appeared first on The Restart Project.

How many products do you need to fix to break a world record? The repair café held in Cambridge earlier this month has set the new magic number: 232. Today, Ugo and Jon talk to Nicole Barton from Cambridge Carbon Footprint, who helped to organise the ‘World’s Biggest Repair Café‘ on Saturday the 11th of November. The event was held with the intention of surpassing the 150 repairs that took place in Vauréal, France – previously the largest community repair event to date.  Out of the 375 items brought in, the 232 items repaired in Cambridge – which included gadgets, clothing, bicycles and furniture – shows a success rate that adheres more or less to what Nicole estimates is the average success rate for community repair events in Cambridge: around 65%. Nicole helped put together the Cambridgeshire Repair Café network, which is a collaboration between various organizations including Cambridge Carbon Footprint and Circular Cambridge. She sees repair as playing an important role in tackling climate change. But there are other important benefits, too. She talks to us about what she calls the ‘kindness’ element: the warmth that emerges in a room where people volunteer their time to help others to learn new skills. In Cambridge, where the ‘Town vs. Gown’ divide can sometimes be keenly felt, this serves as a way to unite the community. This is equally the case in London, where small communities within the metropolis are incredibly important. Our own community lead, Jon Stricklin-Coutinho, talks about his experience working with our community of volunteers both in London and beyond. He talks through some of the ways that its possible to get involved, either by attending a Restart Party in your local area (whether that means volunteering, learning to repair, or just having a look around) or by starting up one yourself. The key to successful community repair is forging connections. People are often more than willing to help, and often all it takes is a bit of asking around in order to find a usable space and some willing co-hosts and volunteers. Organising a repair event does take some amount of admin work, like anything else. But issues with safety and liability are easily navigable, and should not put people off. The joy that comes out of a successful repair event makes it more than worth it, even if no records are broken. Links: ITV: world record success for Cambridge repair café Cambridgeshire Repair Cafés Cambridge Carbon Footprint  The post Restart Radio: Breaking the world record for community repair appeared first on The Restart Project.

Today, Lauren and Ugo talk to John Bumstead – an artist and laptop refurbisher whose company ‘RKDL Inc’ (pronounced “Roadkill”) gives a new life to old Apple Macbooks. Most Macbooks end up recycled – shredded for raw materials. According to John, many discarded Macbooks are only halfway through their lifetime at 5-7 years, and good for another half a decade or more, after a few tweaks. John trawls the internet for wholesale Macbooks. He buys them, refurbishes them, and sells them on at an affordable price. His process sheds light on the somewhat hidden circular world of the online secondhand laptop trade. But John isn’t just a refurbisher: he’s a living example of ways in which repair can be a highly imaginative act. After seeing dozens and dozens of Apple laptops come in to his workshop with strange and wonderful visuals, John started to photograph the faults and upload them online. When he saw they were gathering interest, he began to experiment further, overlaying them with photographs with tree branches, which he loads onto machines with graphics defects in order to purposely distort the image. “I never would have imagined starting my business that I would be a visual artist”, says John.  “I had no idea. And so many amazing things have come out of it.” Source: Instagram @rdklinc John’s work is an example of glitch art – a fascinating movement that sees error and failure as a source of beauty: or in John’s words, as an “electronic ballet”. Communities of glitch artists and repairers might share many of the same aims and philosophies: what better way to highlight planned obsolescence than to draw attention to the aesthetics of error that so many of us are familiar with? Drawing our attention to the fallibility of technology, glitch art gives us a fascinating glimpse into the world behind the polished exterior, the world that repairers have to immerse themselves in each time they diagnose and attempt to fix an item. Source: Instagram @rdklinc We also share some of our own stories about screen faults, including a spectacular DIY fix at a Restart Party that involved a series of clothes pegs positioned carefully to keep a screen working. Screens are by far the most fragile component of the objects we use everyday – our smartphones and laptops – and this fragility is a huge source of frustration. Pushing for more easily replaceable screens is not just a matter of convenience, it is a matter of principle: we do not really own an object until we can understand how to fix it ourselves. Links: RDKL Inc: Website RDKL Inc: Shop RDKL Inc: Instagram Glitchet.com: Glitch Art in Peru  Computerworld: Surface Pro 4 Screen Flickers The post Restart Radio: Glitch art by refurbisher RDKL Inc appeared first on The Restart Project.

Japan has long been at the forefront of the design and manufacture of robot pets: from the Tamagotchi to the Sony Aibo. But how would these gadget-critters be received in the West, where we are less inclined to see the boundaries between animate and inanimate worlds as blurred? Lauren Collee is joined by Restart trustee Carolina Vallejo, who spends a couple of months in Japan each year as co-director of the Koshirakura Landscape Workshop – teaching designing and making for greater social sustainability. Japan was one of the first countries to acknowledge the growing problem of e-waste, and has high electronic recycling targets. Yet we have questions about the success of the Japanese system. Even with recycling and care for resources playing a large part in social attitudes, the current rates of recycling cannot keep up with the increasing demands of a global consumerist culture. We discuss how elements of Shinto philosophy, according to which objects have souls, have contributed to a society that is less hostile to the idea of an inanimate world that communicates with its users than it is here in the UK. A poignant illustration of this is the mass funerals held for the Sony Aibo – multiple generations of robot dog that were discontinued, before a new model was released earlier this year in Japan. Many earlier generation Sony Aibo owners had developed strong emotional attachments to their robotic pets, and were left without ongoing support for its maintenance when the model was discontinued. .@Sony brings back Aibo with some… notable updates https://t.co/cCajlQ96kH pic.twitter.com/zuMCjxoq9B — CNET (@CNET) 1 November 2017 Robot pets have all kinds of potential: from use in nursing homes as therapeutic tools, as a way to encourage people to invest more care and time in the objects they own. But in light of the current model of ownership – where gadgets are dependent on software and services that remains under copyright – we must expect that there will be significant barriers to repairing and adapting them. And while the use of AI might enable these gadgets to develop increasingly distinct ‘personalities’, how could these services be manipulated and/or hacked? Links: BBC: Japan may use e-waste for 2020 medals  New York Times (Video): The Family Dog The new Aibo PARO the therapeutic robot The Guardian: How Paro the robot seal is being used to help UK dementia patients Sherry Turkle (MIT): Robotic pets may be bad medicine for melancholy Boing boing: Sony’s new robot dog doubles down on DRM [Feature Image “img_0169” by Flickr user Steve Rainwater is licensed under CC BY-SA 2.0]     The post Restart Radio: Robot pets appeared first on The Restart Project.

The rapidly-growing Internet of Things (IoT) takes multiple forms: some more useful than others. Broadly defined, the Internet of Things refers to anything that is traditionally ‘dumb’, but is manufactured to communicate – with other devices, or with the internet. A smart kettle, a smart toaster, or a smart central heating system all fall into this category. A world where gadgets can talk to each other brings a whole host of opportunities – but it also throws up unprecedented challenges. Today, Ugo and Jon are joined by Davide Gomba, an Italian maker working on an open-source connected home called ‘Casa Jasmina’. Built to merge traditional Italian skills in interior design with emergent skills in open-source electronics, Casa Jasmina is an ongoing project that provides a test-bed for experiments in IoT. Casa Jasmina demonstrates the potential of smart homes that are tailored to the specific needs of its inhabitants, and how it can facilitate more sustainable practices in the home, for example by reducing energy consumption. Casa Jasmina, Torino. Image by Flickr user Peter Bihr Davide talks about the emerging challenge of controlling IoT via voice. With many voice-controlled assistants working through proprietary platforms, such as that used by Amazon for Alexa, there is a need for an open-source database of voice that can be used by independent makers. We talk about the security risks posed by these new products and services, especially in relation to medical IoT devices such as the artificial pancreas developed for Type 1 diabetics. In terms of e-waste, IoT devices also run the risk of increasing the problem of software obsolescence. If gadgets are developed faster than the resulting software issues that crop up can be addressed, we fall into a pattern by which the life expectancy of our things is drastically decreased. Ugo recently spoke at MozFest about the discontinuation of support for owners of the Pebble Watch after it was bought by Fitbit. The smarter our devices become, the more reliant we become on the assistance of the manufacturers in maintaining them. Links: Casa Jasmina Prof. Ross Anderson: Safety and Security of IoT  Gadgets Now: Smartphone-connected artificial pancreas helps manage diabetes  Mozilla: Common Voice Fixfest: Alison Powell and Kyle Wiens discuss the right to repair and connected devices  [Feature image “Visiting Casa Jasmina” by Flickr user Peter Bihr is licensed under CC-BY 2.0.] The post Restart Radio: Open-sourcing the Internet of Things appeared first on The Restart Project.

On the weekend of 6-8 of October, we hosted the first International Fixfest in London. It was an incredible chance for repairers, makers, activists, tinkerers and academics from all over the world to meet each other, share tips and stories, and come up with joint strategies for repairing into the future. Video recordings of many of the talks and unconference sessions from Fixfest are available on Youtube. You can also read summaries on the Fixfest site. This episode features Dave Pickering, our podcast producer, in conversation with repair group organisers from Holland, Italy, Tunisia, Argentina and more. They discuss whether Fixfest can signal a new era of global collaboration for community repair. This podcast episode is a portrait of an emerging repair movement. And it would not be complete without stories about some of our participants’ favourite community repairs. From an old guitar that means a lot to two particular parents, to a cleverly modified paper shredder, it is clear that repair is about much more than just a successful fix. And even if the benefit to individual and community well-being is much harder to quantify than kilos of waste saved from landfill, these event organisers are hugely motivated by the social aspects of repairing together. Over the coming months, we’ll be featuring more material from Fixfest on our podcast, including an interview with Lewis Dartnell – author or ‘The Knowledge’ – in which we imagine that we have to rebuild all the technologies we’ve come to depend upon from scratch. In another episode, we talk to designer Leyla Acaroglu about her positive vision for systems change, and how we might go about achieving it. Stay tuned! The post Restart Podcast Ep. 26: Fixers united at the first Fixfest appeared first on The Restart Project.