With the UK’s General Election due to take place on 12 December, many issues have been covered in the media.  One key area of interest for businesses is technology and for those of you who may not have time to plough through the manifestos of the main parties, here’s a quick look at some of the technology-related pledges and ideas featured in those manifestos.

CONSERVATIVES

With the Conservative government being in power since May 2010 (firstly in coalition with the Lib Dems) the tech vision, policies and direction of travel is, of course, a little clearer to all. The EU referendum under David Cameron heralded the need for UK data protection laws to be aligned with a the EU’s GDPR and an uncertainty and concerns that UK employers would be less likely to seek migrant tech employees, and that fewer overseas tech workers seek on to stay in their jobs in the UK, in an environment where the challenge posed by a tech skills gap was already evident.  Having said that, back in 2017, the Conservative government under Teresa May announced a boost to the UK’s digital and technology industries in the form of £700m of funding as part of the launch of its Industrial Strategy Challenge Fund. Also, under the Conservatives, a National Cyber Security Centre was set up in London in February (to act as part of GCHQ in Cheltenham), which was intended to enable businesses to report serious data breaches to the NCSC in confidence.

Looking forward to this 2019 election then, the Conservative manifesto features some of the following technology ideas and pledges:

• The setting up of a new, dedicated national cybercrime force and National Crime Laboratory, both of which are intended to help the police to safely get the benefits from the use of new technologies like biometrics and artificial intelligence, and to use DNA, all within a strict legal framework.
• Providing gigabit broadband access for “every home and business” by 2025 to help businesses and remote workers, to be paid for under the ‘National Infrastructure Strategy’.
• Investing £1bn in “completing a fast-charging network” for electric vehicles to make sure that “everyone is within 30 miles of a rapid electric vehicle charging station”.
• With reference to R&D tax credits, increasing the tax credit rate to 13 per cent and reviewing the definition of R&D so that investments in innovation and productivity-boosting cloud computing and data are incentivised.
• Creating a new £3 billion (over the next Parliament) National Skills Fund to provide matching funding for individuals and SMEs for high-quality education and training.
• Creating 20 Institutes of Technology, to connect teaching in science, technology, engineering and maths to business and industry.
• Investing in “world-class computing and health data systems” to help with research.

LABOUR

In the Labour Party’s 2019 manifesto, party leader and leader of the opposition Jeremy Corbyn says that he’s planning to “launch the largest-scale investment programme in modern times to fund the jobs and industries of the future so that no one is held back and no community left behind.”

Some of the key technology-related pledges and ideas that feature in the Labour Party’s manifesto for the coming 2019 General Election include:

• A proposal which has attracted a lot of media attention (and criticism from the Conservatives) to re-nationalise part of BT and deliver free full-fibre broadband to all.
• This will involve the creation of two new government entities: British Digital Infrastructure and British Broadband Service (BBS) to help roll out of full-fibre networks and coordinate the delivery of free broadband. Labour says this can all be paid for through the party’s planned Green Transformation Fund and a new tax regime for multinational companies, and there will be a jobs guarantee for all workers in existing broadband infrastructure and retail broadband work.
• The appointing of a cabinet-level minister dedicated to cybersecurity to help ensure that the nation’s cybersecurity issues are tackled effectively and to offer regular reviews of cyber-readiness.
• Giving officials working for National Cyber Security Centre (NCSC), which is the public-facing division of GCHQ, the power to audit public and private sector organisations’ cyber defences and issue warnings to organisations in order to reduce their cyber risk.
• Ensuring that no services are offered on a “digital-only” basis in order to try and remove the so-called ‘digital barrier’ that may exclude vulnerable people, and also to offer telephone, face-to-face and outreach support.
• Bringing in a legal right to collective consultation on the implementation of new technology in workplaces in order to ensure more rights and protections for workers whose jobs may be at risk of being lost or reduced as a result of technological advancement.

THE LIBERAL DEMOCRATS

The big news is that beyond the 12-key policies focused on by the media, the Jo Swinson-led Liberal Democrats (Lib Dems) have their eyes set upon a “vision for an innovation-led economy”.  With stopping Brexit as their main focus, the party makes the point that retaining the Freedom of movement that EU membership has given could mean that British tech industries can “have access to the best and brightest talent from the EU” and thereby giving “businesses opportunities to grow and contribute to life and prosperity in the UK.”

Some of the other key technology areas that the Lib Dem’s say in their manifesto that their innovation-led vision will cover include:

• Positioning the UK to become a world leader in new technologies like artificial intelligence (AI).
• A belief that the EU should make solid new legislation about blockchain, AI and other new technologies.
• Giving high priority to matters relating to cybersecurity, data protection and privacy matters.
• Seeking to encourage competition from companies in the “digital space” and supporting the use of European and UK competition powers to stop “tech giants” from exploiting consumers and ensuring innovation through competition.
• Increasing the national spend on R&D to 3% of GDP (2.4% by no later than 2027), doubling innovation spend and creating “catapult” innovation and technology centres.
• Allowing companies to claim R&D tax credits against the cost of purchasing datasets and cloud computing, as well as simplifying regulations speeding up regulatory change.
• Creating a “startup allowance” to support fast-growing businesses e.g. tech startups.

THE GREEN PARTY

Even though the Green Party’s leader (and Brighton MP) Caroline Lucas was the party’s only MP elected in the last general election, they now have 7 MEPs in the European Parliament. Obviously, Green Party pledges and ideas relate strongly to environmental issues, and some of the technology-related pledges and ideas in their 2019 General Election manifesto (which pledges zero carbon by 2020) include:

• Delivering financial mechanisms and the transfer of new technologies to help the Global South adapt to climate change in a just way.
• As part of the “Green New Deal”, including finance and technology to “help the majority world adapt to climate change”, support human well-being,  and to break “the carbon chains of fossil fuel dependence”, thereby bringing about a “green economic and social revolution”.
• Setting new clean technology standards and investing in research.
• Applying a Carbon Tax to help incentivise industry to switch to low and zero-carbon technology and equipment.
• Making finance and technology available to support developing nations.
• Introducing a Digital Bill of Rights (a new law) in order make the UK a leading voice on standards for the rule of law and democracy in digital spaces and to ensure independent regulation of social media providers. This law will also be designed to safeguard elections from foreign interference.

General Election – 12 December

Obviously, there are other political parties that make up and influence the UK political landscape, and which have technology-related pledges, but hopefully, this shorthand summary of some of the key tech pledges from the main players has provided some insight into where they say they stand on technology matters.

Clearly, elections are decided on a wide range of different issues and subjects and even though Brexit has been a dominant issue for some time now, it remains to be seen how the political and economic landscape will be changed after 12 December.  Technology, however, will continue to advance, and exciting new areas such as AI promise to create new opportunities for businesses going forward.

Researchers from the University of Delaware have concluded that when it comes to authentication for logins, Memes may be one of the strongest techniques to distinguish between a human and a bot.

The Bot Challenge

One of the great challenges to websites when it comes to authentication for logins is that software bots can fool relatively simple tests such as ticking a box to say, ‘I’m not a robot’ and CAPTCHA (both words and images). Also, neural networks and machine learning have helped to train bots to behave more like humans.  With more than half of web traffic believed to be made of bots and to stop bots gaining easy access to sensitive data, correct authentication needs to be based upon a system that can effectively tell humans and bots apart.

Memes Could Be The Answer

According to the University of Delaware researchers, the dynamic nature of memes and the fact that bots don’t get cultural references and online humour, and that humans are familiar with and can understand memes with a greater depth than bots could mean that memes could be the answer to the ‘bot or human’ authentication challenge.

Memes are activities, concepts, catchphrases, or pieces of media, often humorous and/or mimicking, and commonly in the form of an image, gif or video that have cultural meaning and tend to be shared widely on social media platforms.

How Could Memes Work For Authentication?

According to the researchers, after the correct username and password have been verified on login to a website, a meme could be displayed with a question about the meme that relates to something that bots wouldn’t be able to spot.  For example, this question could relate to the facial expression of the person in the meme or to the action taking place in the meme (bots wouldn’t be able to accurately tell what the facial expression is or what it means in relation to that meme). Several possible answers relating to that meme could be given and clicking on the right option will mean that a person is granted entry to the website.

The fact that there is a vast number of memes available online means that the meme and its answer options used for one authentication process can then be deleted from the database to ensure that no answers are stored and learned by bots.

What Does This Mean For Your Business?

With more than half of web traffic being made up of bots, and with bots being able to fool many existing systems and with the data security, privacy and fraud risks that bots pose, businesses need to know that their websites have an effective system that can accurately distinguish between humans and bots at the login stage, but not make the process of authentication too complicated or lengthy for registered users.

The cultural references, humour, and subtleties in memes could, therefore, make them an effective way to make that distinction, and could keep businesses ahead of the game until AI/machine learning in bots necessitates another change.

The New York Times has reported that despite Intel issuing patches for security flaws (that were discovered last year) in its processors, security researchers are alleging that the processors still have some serious vulnerabilities.

What Flaws?

In January 2018, it was discovered that nearly all computer processors made in the last 20 years contained two flaws known as ‘Meltdown’ and ‘Spectre’. The 2 flaws could make it easier for something like a malicious program to steal data that is stored in the memory of other running programs.

Meltdown, discovered by researchers from Google’s Project Zero, the Technical University of Graz in Austria and the security firm Cerberus Security in Germany, affects all Intel, ARM, and other processors that use ‘speculative execution’ to improve their performance; i.e. when a computer performs a task that may not be actually needed in order to reduce overall delays for the task (a kind of optimisation).

Meltdown could, for example, leave passwords and personal data vulnerable to attacks, and could be applied to different cloud service providers as well as individual devices. It is believed that Meltdown could affect every processor since 1995, except for Intel Itanium and Intel Atom before 2013.

Spectre, which affects Intel, AMD and ARM (mainly Cortex-A) processors, allows applications to be fooled into leaking confidential information. Spectre affects almost all systems including desktops, laptops, cloud servers, and smartphones.

8 More Flaws Discovered

Then, in May 2018, 8 more security flaws in chips/processors were discovered by several different security teams.  The new ‘family’ of bugs were dubbed Spectre Next Generation (Spectre NB).

September 2018

According to reports by The New York Times, the Dutch researchers (at Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam) also reported a range of security issues about Intel’s processors to the company in September 2018 and provided Intel with a proof-of-concept code to help them to develop fixes

14 Months On – Only Some Fixes

It has been reported that after waiting 8 months to allow Intel enough time to develop fixes (of which only some have issued), and more than a year after providing Intel with a proof-of-concept code, Intel has only just announced the issue of more security updates earlier this week.

More Vulnerabilities

Unfortunately for Intel, just as they announced the issue of new security fixes last week, the researchers notified them of more unfixed flaws, and it has been alleged that Intel asked the researchers to alter the report about the flaws and to effectively stay quiet about them.

MDS

The latest unpatched flaw in Intel processors that the researchers from Amsterdam, Belgium, Germany and Austria have gone public about is a hacking technique, which is a variant of ZombieLoad or RIDL (Rogue In-Flight Data Load). The technique which exploits a flaw in Intel processors is known as microarchitectural data sampling (MDS) and it can enable hackers to carry out several different exploits e.g. running code on the victim’s computer that forces the processor to leak data.

Criticism

The news that there may still be flaws in Intel’s processors after the company appears to have had a long time to fix them has prompted some criticism of Intel online, some of it reported in the New York Times e.g. allegations  that there has been a lack of transparency about the issue from Intel, that the company has tried to downplay the problems, and allegations that Intel may not decide to do much to fix the problem until its reputation is at stake.

What Does This Mean For Your Business?

Bearing in mind that these flaws are likely to exist at the architectural level in the majority of processors, this story is bad news for businesses that have been legitimately trying to make themselves totally compliant with GDPR and as secure as possible from attack.

For the time being, in the short term, and unless processor companies try to completely re-design processors to eliminate the flaws, closing hardware flaws using software patches is the only realistic way to tackle the problem and this can be a big job for manufacturers, software companies, and other organisations that choose to take that step. It is good practice anyway for businesses to install all available patches and make sure that they are receiving updates for all systems, software and devices.

The hope is now that researchers can put enough pressure on processor manufacturers e.g. through bad publicity to make them speed up their efforts to tackle the known security flaws in their products.

The new 1.0 browser from Brave removes ads and ad trackers and pays users through a reward system for viewing the ads that Brave presents.

Brave?

Brave is a San Francisco based start-up company, founded in 2015 and led by CEO Brendan Eich, formally of Firefox.

Ad and Tracker-Free

Two of the key advantages of the new Brave browser are that it protects a user’s privacy by removing ad trackers and makes browsing a faster (download time) and less distracting experience by removing adverts.

Displays Its Own Adverts and Pays You For Viewing Them

The big difference about Brave is that it offers its own Brave Rewards system. Users who join the system only see adverts from Brave and are paid 70% of the resulting ad revenue using Brave’s own crypto-token, the Basic Attention Token (BAT).  Brave also sends the revenue you accrue back to the websites you’ve visited.

The advantages of this system should be that it can lure new users to Brave in a crowded browser market with the promise of money and a better browsing experience and improved privacy and that websites can still find a way to support themselves with advertising without having to share the personal data of users with tech companies.  The hope is that, if this browser and model gains user approval on a large-scale it will eventually deter publishers from trying to profile the behaviour of their users via privacy-invading trackers.

Earnings

Users who sign-up to the Brave Rewards system can choose where to direct the BAT they’ve earned e.g. send it certain sites, tip Twitter and Reddit users or choose to convert it into currency (which is unlikely to be a large amount).

Numbers

There are some very well-established players in the Browser market which is currently dominated by Google Chrome which has more than 65% of the market (around 2+ billion installs).

In comparison, Brave says that it is used 8.7 million times each month on Windows, macOS, Android and iOS. The company has, however, reported that the number of users is growing by 10% per month.

What Does This Mean For Your Business?

Privacy is a big concern for all web-users and trying to download web pages that are full of adverts can be a frustrating and a time and power-draining experience. Businesses also need to be able to use the tools available to them to make sure that they can get the maximum ROI from their advertising spend, plus the big tech companies need to be able to offer their business customers an ad system that delivers results, hence the perceived need for trackers and profiling the behaviour of customers.  Web publishers also need to have a viable way to help support their sites and offer content to their users (without a payment gateway) and this has traditionally been through advertising on their pages, much to the frustration of website visitors.  Brave’s browser, therefore, tries to meet the needs of all these groups in one package.  The combination of improved privacy, financial incentives and better browsing experience may prove appealing to users, and publishers may take note of the Brave model and realise that there is another way of supporting their sites. It remains to be seen, however, how much share of the browser market Brave can gain and how well it fares against some powerful and entrenched competitors.

Tech giant Google is crossing over into the banking world by partnering with Citigroup to offer ‘smart checking’ accounts (bank current accounts) next year as part of its ‘Cache’ project.

Partnering, Not Self-Branding

Google is reported to be prepared to rely heavily on the knowledge of Citibank partner in the project and will not be self-branding the accounts. Google will, no doubt, be grateful for the guidance of its partner through the complicated regulatory aspects of banking.

Other Tech Companies Too

Google’s move into the finance world follows that of competitor tech giants, some of whom have experienced a bumpy ride in banking territory such as:

– Facebook developing its own cryptocurrency called Libra which has recently suffered the departure of big names from the association of organisations that was set up to run the currency – PayPal has dropped out with Mastercard, Visa, and digital payment platform and processor Strip soon to follow.

– Apple introducing its own credit card, the ‘Apple Card’ in the US in partnership with Goldman Sachs and with processing by Mastercard.  The card system operates through the Wallet app on iPhone (iPhone 6 and later), but Apple soon suffered criticism that the physical titanium card that accompanies each account would be vulnerable to damage by everyday material surfaces such as denim and leather, thereby rendering potentially impractical.

– Amazon offering credit card and business loans, with a view to boosting its own e-commerce business.

Uber Money offering credit cards, debit accounts and money tracking tools to help the company with its own taxi operations.

Why?

Like other tech companies, Google’s massive customer base and widely recognised brand mean that it can leverage this power through brand extension.  Google knows that by simply supplying more of peoples’ needs online, often by strategic alliance, it can stay competitive, and find new users and new opportunities.

Privacy & Trust Worries

Some technology commentators have, however, have expressed worries that giving tech companies access to our financial information could mean that they know too much about us, and may be tempted to share data with (or sell that data to) their advertising arm or other organisations.

Although Google has said that it will not be selling or sharing its account holders’ financial data just as it doesn’t share data from its Google Pay service with advertisers, there has been a recent report that Google may be able to gain access to personal medical data of up to 50 million Americans through its partnership with the healthcare giant Ascendant.

Research

Research has indicated that consumers are likely to trust Google with their financial affairs.  For example, a study by McKinsey & Company revealed that 58% of people (surveyed) said they would trust Google with financial products.

UK BoE Governor

Back in June UK BoE Governor, Mark Carney offered tech companies and all payment providers the chance to store funds overnight in interest-bearing accounts at the central bank and appeared to be adopting an “open mind but no open door” approach to Facebook’s Libra cryptocurrency.

What Does This Mean For Your Business?

It was more or less inevitable that the reach and brand power of tech giants, who are already trusted with many personal aspects of our lives would mean that they want (and would be able) to move into the world of our personal finances too.  The move may be a win/win for both the financial partners (who can learn how to upgrade the tech of their service) and the tech giants who can find out even more about us and can become even more essential partners to us in all parts of our digital life.

The damage to trust, however, caused by Facebook’s sharing of harvested user data with Cambridge Analytica has left some people with reservations about trusting tech companies with too much of our personal data.