| Recorded at | April 27, 2012 |
|---|---|
| Event | TEDxSussexUniversity |
| Duration (min:sec) | 16:50 |
| Video Type | TEDx Talk |
| Words per minute | 250.18 very fast |
| Readability (FK) | 67.6 very easy |
| Speaker | David Birch |
| Description | digital money and identity consultant; TED speaker |
Official TED page for this talk
Synopsis
Bartenders need to know your age, retailers need your PIN, but almost no one actually needs your name -- except for identity thieves. ID expert David Birch proposes a safer approach to personal identification -- a "fractured" approach -- that would almost never require your real name.
| 1 | 00:13 | So I thought I'd talk about identity. | ||
| 2 | 00:15 | That's sort of an interesting enough topic to me. | ||
| 3 | 00:18 | And the reason was, because when I was asked to do this, | ||
| 4 | 00:21 | I'd just read in one of the papers, I can't remember, | ||
| 5 | 00:25 | something from someone at Facebook saying, | ||
| 6 | 00:27 | "Well, we need to make everybody use their real names, | ||
| 7 | 00:30 | and then that's basically all the problems solved." | ||
| 8 | 00:33 | And that's so wrong, | ||
| 9 | 00:34 | that's such a fundamentally reactionary view of identity, | ||
| 10 | 00:38 | and it's going to get us into all sorts of trouble. | ||
| 11 | 00:40 | And so what I thought I'd do is, | ||
| 12 | 00:42 | I'll explain four sort of problems about it, | ||
| 13 | 00:46 | and then I'll suggest a solution, | ||
| 14 | 00:48 | which, hopefully, you might find interesting. | ||
| 15 | 00:50 | So just to frame the problem: | ||
| 16 | 00:51 | What does "authenticity" mean? | ||
| 17 | 00:53 | That's me, | ||
| 18 | 00:55 | that's a camera phone picture of me looking at a painting. | ||
| 19 | 00:59 | [What's the Problem?] | ||
| 20 | 01:01 | That's a painting that was painted by a very famous forger, | ||
| 21 | 01:03 | and because I'm not very good at presentations, | ||
| 22 | 01:06 | I already can't remember the name that I wrote on my card. | ||
| 23 | 01:08 | And he was incarcerated in, I think, Wakefield Prison, | ||
| 24 | 01:12 | for forging masterpieces by, I think, French Impressionists. | ||
| 25 | 01:16 | And he's so good at it that when he was in prison, | ||
| 26 | 01:19 | everybody in prison, the governor and whatever, | ||
| 27 | 01:21 | wanted him to paint masterpieces to put on the walls | ||
| 28 | 01:23 | because they were so good. | ||
| 29 | 01:25 | And so that's a masterpiece, which is a fake of a masterpiece, | ||
| 30 | 01:28 | and bonded into the canvas is a chip which identifies that as a real fake, | ||
| 31 | 01:35 | if you see what I mean. | ||
| 32 | 01:36 | (Laughter) | ||
| 33 | 01:37 | So when we're talking about authenticity, | ||
| 34 | 01:39 | it's a little more fractal than it appears, | ||
| 35 | 01:41 | and that's a good example to show it. | ||
| 36 | 01:44 | I tried to pick four problems that will frame the issue properly. | ||
| 37 | 01:49 | So the first problem, I thought, chip and PIN, right? | ||
| 38 | 01:51 | [Banks and legacies bringing down the system from within] | ||
| 39 | 01:54 | [Offline solutions do not work online] | ||
| 40 | 01:56 | Everyone's got a chip and PIN card, right? | ||
| 41 | 01:58 | So why is that a good example? | ||
| 42 | 02:00 | That's the example of how legacy thinking about identity | ||
| 43 | 02:02 | subverts the security of a well-constructed system. | ||
| 44 | 02:05 | That chip-and-PIN card that's in your pocket | ||
| 45 | 02:08 | has a little chip on it that cost millions of pounds to develop, | ||
| 46 | 02:11 | is extremely secure, | ||
| 47 | 02:13 | you can put scanning electron microscopes on it, | ||
| 48 | 02:15 | you can try and grind it down, blah blah blah. | ||
| 49 | 02:17 | Those chips have never been broken, whatever you read in the paper. | ||
| 50 | 02:21 | And for a joke, we take that supersecure chip, | ||
| 51 | 02:24 | and we bond it to a trivially counterfeitable magnetic stripe. | ||
| 52 | 02:28 | And for very lazy criminals, we still emboss the card. | ||
| 53 | 02:31 | So if you're a criminal in a hurry and you need to copy someone's card, | ||
| 54 | 02:35 | you can just stick a piece of paper on it and rub a pencil over it | ||
| 55 | 02:38 | just to speed things up. | ||
| 56 | 02:39 | And even more amusingly, and on my debit card, too, | ||
| 57 | 02:42 | we print the name and the sort code and everything else on the front. | ||
| 58 | 02:45 | Why? | ||
| 59 | 02:47 | There is no earthly reason why your name is printed on a chip-and-PIN card. | ||
| 60 | 02:51 | And if you think about it, | ||
| 61 | 02:53 | it's even more insidious and perverse than it seems at first. | ||
| 62 | 02:56 | Because the only people that benefit from having the name on the card | ||
| 63 | 03:00 | are criminals. | ||
| 64 | 03:01 | You know what your name is, right? | ||
| 65 | 03:03 | (Laughter) | ||
| 66 | 03:04 | And when you go into a shop and buy something, | ||
| 67 | 03:06 | it's a PIN -- he doesn't care what the name is. | ||
| 68 | 03:08 | The only place you ever have to write your name on the back | ||
| 69 | 03:11 | is in America. | ||
| 70 | 03:12 | Whenever I go to America, | ||
| 71 | 03:14 | and I have to pay with a magstripe on the back of the card, | ||
| 72 | 03:17 | I always sign it "Carlos Tethers" anyway, just as a security mechanism, | ||
| 73 | 03:20 | because if a transaction ever gets disputed, | ||
| 74 | 03:22 | and it comes back and it says "Dave Birch," | ||
| 75 | 03:24 | I know it must have been a criminal, | ||
| 76 | 03:26 | because I would never sign it "Dave Birch." | ||
| 77 | 03:28 | (Laughter) | ||
| 78 | 03:29 | So if you drop your card in the street, | ||
| 79 | 03:31 | it means a criminal can pick it up and read it. | ||
| 80 | 03:34 | They know the name, from the name, they can find the address, | ||
| 81 | 03:37 | and then they can go off and buy stuff online. | ||
| 82 | 03:39 | Why do we put the name on the card? | ||
| 83 | 03:40 | Because we think identity is something to do with names, | ||
| 84 | 03:44 | and because we're rooted in the idea of the identity card, | ||
| 85 | 03:48 | which obsesses us. | ||
| 86 | 03:49 | And I know it crashed and burned a couple of years ago, | ||
| 87 | 03:52 | but if you're someone in politics or the Home Office or whatever, | ||
| 88 | 03:56 | and you think about identity, | ||
| 89 | 03:57 | you can only think of identity in terms of cards with names on. | ||
| 90 | 04:01 | And that's very subversive in a modern world. | ||
| 91 | 04:04 | So the second example I thought I'd use | ||
| 92 | 04:06 | is chat rooms. | ||
| 93 | 04:08 | [Chatrooms and Children] | ||
| 94 | 04:09 | I'm very proud of that picture. | ||
| 95 | 04:11 | That's my son playing in his band with his friends | ||
| 96 | 04:13 | for the first-ever gig, I believe you call it, where he got paid. | ||
| 97 | 04:17 | (Laughter) | ||
| 98 | 04:18 | And I love that picture. | ||
| 99 | 04:20 | I'll like the picture of him getting into medical school a lot better, | ||
| 100 | 04:23 | (Laughter) | ||
| 101 | 04:24 | I like that one for the moment. | ||
| 102 | 04:26 | Why do I use that picture? | ||
| 103 | 04:27 | Because that was very interesting, watching that experience as an old person. | ||
| 104 | 04:32 | So him and his friends, | ||
| 105 | 04:33 | they get together, they booked a room, like a church hall, | ||
| 106 | 04:36 | and they got all their friends who had bands, got them together, | ||
| 107 | 04:39 | and they do it all on Facebook, | ||
| 108 | 04:41 | and then they sell tickets, and the first band on the -- | ||
| 109 | 04:44 | I was going to say "menu," that's probably the wrong word for it, isn't it? | ||
| 110 | 04:48 | The first band on the list of bands | ||
| 111 | 04:50 | that appears at some public music performance of some kind | ||
| 112 | 04:54 | gets the sales from the first 20 tickets, | ||
| 113 | 04:56 | then the next band gets the next 20, | ||
| 114 | 04:58 | and so on. | ||
| 115 | 04:59 | They were at the bottom of the menu, like, fifth, | ||
| 116 | 05:01 | I thought they had no chance. | ||
| 117 | 05:03 | He actually got 20 quid. Fantastic, right? | ||
| 118 | 05:05 | But my point is, that all worked perfectly, | ||
| 119 | 05:07 | except on the web. | ||
| 120 | 05:09 | So they're sitting on Facebook, | ||
| 121 | 05:12 | and they're sending these messages and arranging things, | ||
| 122 | 05:15 | and they don't know who anybody is, right? | ||
| 123 | 05:17 | That's the problem we're trying to solve. | ||
| 124 | 05:19 | If only they were using real names, | ||
| 125 | 05:21 | then you wouldn't be worried about them on the internet. | ||
| 126 | 05:23 | So when he says to me, | ||
| 127 | 05:25 | "Oh, I want to go to a chat room to talk about guitars" or something, | ||
| 128 | 05:29 | I'm like, "Oh, well, I don't want you to go into a chat room | ||
| 129 | 05:32 | to talk about guitars, | ||
| 130 | 05:34 | because they might not all be your friends, | ||
| 131 | 05:36 | and some of the people that are in the chat room | ||
| 132 | 05:38 | might be, you know, perverts and teachers and vicars --" | ||
| 133 | 05:41 | (Laughter) | ||
| 134 | 05:43 | I mean, they generally are, when you look in the paper, right? | ||
| 135 | 05:46 | "So I want to know who all the people in the chat room are. | ||
| 136 | 05:49 | So, OK, you can go in the chat room, | ||
| 137 | 05:51 | but only if everybody in the chat room is using their real names, | ||
| 138 | 05:54 | and they submit full copies of their police report." | ||
| 139 | 05:57 | (Laughter) | ||
| 140 | 05:58 | But of course, if anybody in the chat room asked for his real name, | ||
| 141 | 06:02 | I'd say, "No. You can't give them your real name, | ||
| 142 | 06:04 | because what happens if they turn out to be perverts | ||
| 143 | 06:07 | and teachers and whatever?" | ||
| 144 | 06:09 | So you have this odd sort of paradox | ||
| 145 | 06:11 | where I'm happy for him to go into this space | ||
| 146 | 06:13 | if I know who everybody else is, | ||
| 147 | 06:15 | but I don't want anybody else to know who he is. | ||
| 148 | 06:17 | And so you get this sort of logjam around identity, | ||
| 149 | 06:20 | where you want full disclosure from everybody else, | ||
| 150 | 06:22 | but not from yourself. | ||
| 151 | 06:23 | And there's no progress, we get stuck. | ||
| 152 | 06:25 | So the chat room thing doesn't work properly, | ||
| 153 | 06:27 | and it's a very bad way of thinking about identity. | ||
| 154 | 06:30 | Cheerleading ... so, on my RSS feed, I saw this thing about -- | ||
| 155 | 06:34 | I just said something bad about my RSS feed, didn't I? | ||
| 156 | 06:37 | I should stop saying it like that. | ||
| 157 | 06:39 | For some random reason I can't imagine, | ||
| 158 | 06:40 | something about cheerleaders turned up in my in-box. | ||
| 159 | 06:43 | And I read this story about cheerleaders, and it's a fascinating story. | ||
| 160 | 06:46 | This happened a couple of years ago in the US. | ||
| 161 | 06:48 | There were some cheerleaders in a team at a high school in the US, | ||
| 162 | 06:52 | and they said mean things about their cheerleading coach, | ||
| 163 | 06:55 | as I'm sure kids do about all of their teachers all of the time, | ||
| 164 | 06:58 | and somehow, the cheerleading coach found out about this. | ||
| 165 | 07:01 | She was very upset. | ||
| 166 | 07:02 | So she went to one of the girls and said, | ||
| 167 | 07:04 | "You have to give me your Facebook password." | ||
| 168 | 07:06 | I read this all the time, | ||
| 169 | 07:08 | where even at some universities and places of education, | ||
| 170 | 07:10 | kids are forced to hand over their Facebook passwords. | ||
| 171 | 07:13 | So you have to give them your Facebook password. | ||
| 172 | 07:15 | So the kid -- she was a kid! -- what she should have said is, | ||
| 173 | 07:18 | "My lawyer will be calling you first thing in the morning. | ||
| 174 | 07:21 | It's an outrageous imposition on my Fourth Amendment right to privacy. | ||
| 175 | 07:24 | You'll be sued for all the money you've got!" | ||
| 176 | 07:26 | That's what she should have said. | ||
| 177 | 07:28 | But she's a kid, so she hands over the password. | ||
| 178 | 07:30 | The teacher can't log in, | ||
| 179 | 07:32 | because the school has blocked access to Facebook. | ||
| 180 | 07:34 | So the teacher can't log into Facebook till she gets home. | ||
| 181 | 07:37 | So the girl tells her friends, | ||
| 182 | 07:38 | "Guess what happened? The teacher logged in. She knows." | ||
| 183 | 07:41 | So the girls all logged into Facebook and deleted their profiles. | ||
| 184 | 07:44 | So when the teacher logged in, there was nothing there. | ||
| 185 | 07:47 | My point is: those identities, they don't think about them the same way. | ||
| 186 | 07:51 | Identity is -- especially when you're a teenager -- a fluid thing. | ||
| 187 | 07:55 | You have lots of identities, you experiment with them. | ||
| 188 | 07:57 | And if you have an identity you don't like because it's subverted in some way | ||
| 189 | 08:01 | or it's insecure or it's inappropriate, | ||
| 190 | 08:03 | you just delete it and get another one. | ||
| 191 | 08:05 | The idea that you have an identity that's given to you by someone, | ||
| 192 | 08:08 | the government or whatever, | ||
| 193 | 08:09 | and you have to stick with that identity and use it in all places | ||
| 194 | 08:12 | is absolutely wrong. | ||
| 195 | 08:14 | Why would you want to really know who someone was on Facebook, | ||
| 196 | 08:17 | unless you wanted to abuse them and harass them in some way? | ||
| 197 | 08:19 | It just doesn't work properly. | ||
| 198 | 08:21 | And my fourth example is, | ||
| 199 | 08:23 | there are some cases where you really want to be -- | ||
| 200 | 08:26 | in case you're wondering, that's me at the G20 protest. | ||
| 201 | 08:30 | I wasn't actually at the G20 protest, | ||
| 202 | 08:31 | but I had a meeting at a bank on the day of the G20 protest. | ||
| 203 | 08:35 | And I got an email from the bank, saying, | ||
| 204 | 08:37 | "Please don't wear a suit, because it'll inflame the protesters." | ||
| 205 | 08:41 | I look pretty good in a suit, frankly, | ||
| 206 | 08:43 | so you can see why it would drive them into an anticapitalist frenzy. | ||
| 207 | 08:46 | (Laughter) | ||
| 208 | 08:47 | So I thought, "Well, if I don't want to inflame the protesters, | ||
| 209 | 08:51 | the obvious thing to do is go dressed as a protester." | ||
| 210 | 08:53 | So I went dressed completely in black, you know, black balaclava ... | ||
| 211 | 08:57 | I had black gloves on but took them off to sign the visitors' book. | ||
| 212 | 09:00 | (Laughter) | ||
| 213 | 09:01 | I'm wearing black trousers and boots, I'm dressed completely in black. | ||
| 214 | 09:04 | I go into the bank at 10am and go, "Hi, I'm Dave Birch, | ||
| 215 | 09:07 | I've got a 3 o'clock with so-and-so." | ||
| 216 | 09:09 | "Sure!" And they sign me in. There's my visitor's badge. | ||
| 217 | 09:11 | (Laughter) | ||
| 218 | 09:12 | So this nonsense about "you've got to have real names on Facebook" and whatever, | ||
| 219 | 09:16 | that gets you that kind of security. | ||
| 220 | 09:18 | That gets you "security theater," | ||
| 221 | 09:20 | where there's no actual security, | ||
| 222 | 09:22 | but people are sort of playing parts in a play about security, | ||
| 223 | 09:26 | and as long as everybody learns their lines, | ||
| 224 | 09:28 | everyone's happy. | ||
| 225 | 09:29 | But it's not real security, right? | ||
| 226 | 09:32 | Especially because I hate banks more than the G20 protesters do, | ||
| 227 | 09:35 | because I work for them. | ||
| 228 | 09:36 | I know that things are actually worse than these guys think. | ||
| 229 | 09:39 | (Laughter) | ||
| 230 | 09:42 | But suppose I worked next to somebody in a bank | ||
| 231 | 09:47 | who was doing something -- | ||
| 232 | 09:48 | you know, they were like people who take the money from banks and don't ... | ||
| 233 | 09:53 | you know, they take the money ... | ||
| 234 | 09:55 | Oh -- "traders." That's the word I was thinking of. | ||
| 235 | 09:57 | Suppose I was sitting next to a rogue trader, | ||
| 236 | 09:59 | and I want to report it to the boss of the bank. | ||
| 237 | 10:01 | So I log on to do a little whistleblowing. | ||
| 238 | 10:03 | I send a message, "This guy's a rogue trader." | ||
| 239 | 10:06 | That message is meaningless | ||
| 240 | 10:07 | if you don't know that I'm a trader at the bank. | ||
| 241 | 10:10 | If that message just comes from anybody, | ||
| 242 | 10:12 | it has zero information value. | ||
| 243 | 10:14 | There's no point in sending that message. | ||
| 244 | 10:16 | You have to know that I'm ... | ||
| 245 | 10:18 | But if I have to prove who I am, | ||
| 246 | 10:21 | I'll never send that message. | ||
| 247 | 10:23 | It's just like the nurse in the hospital reporting the drunk surgeon. | ||
| 248 | 10:26 | That message will only happen if I'm anonymous. | ||
| 249 | 10:29 | So the system has to have ways of providing anonymity in it, | ||
| 250 | 10:34 | otherwise, we don't get where we want to get to. | ||
| 251 | 10:36 | So, four issues. | ||
| 252 | 10:38 | So what are we going to do about it? | ||
| 253 | 10:40 | Well, what we tend to do about it | ||
| 254 | 10:44 | is we think about Orwell-space. | ||
| 255 | 10:46 | And we try to make electronic versions of the identity card | ||
| 256 | 10:50 | that we got rid of in 1953. | ||
| 257 | 10:52 | So we think if we had a card -- | ||
| 258 | 10:54 | call it a Facebook login -- | ||
| 259 | 10:56 | which proves who you are, | ||
| 260 | 10:57 | and I make you carry it all the time, | ||
| 261 | 10:59 | that solves the problem. | ||
| 262 | 11:00 | And of course, for all those reasons I've just outlined, it doesn't, | ||
| 263 | 11:03 | and it might make some problems worse. | ||
| 264 | 11:05 | The more times you're forced to use your real identity, | ||
| 265 | 11:08 | certainly in transactional terms, | ||
| 266 | 11:09 | the more likely that identity is to get stolen and subverted. | ||
| 267 | 11:12 | The goal is to stop people from using identity | ||
| 268 | 11:14 | in transactions which don't need identity, | ||
| 269 | 11:16 | which is actually almost all transactions. | ||
| 270 | 11:19 | Almost all of the transactions you do are not "Who are you?" | ||
| 271 | 11:23 | They're "Are you allowed to drive the car?" | ||
| 272 | 11:25 | "Are you allowed in the building?" "Are you over 18?" | ||
| 273 | 11:27 | etcetera, etcetera. | ||
| 274 | 11:29 | So my suggestion -- I, like James, | ||
| 275 | 11:31 | think that there should be a resurgence of interest in R and D. | ||
| 276 | 11:34 | I think this is a solvable problem. | ||
| 277 | 11:36 | It's something we can do about. | ||
| 278 | 11:37 | Naturally, in these circumstances, I turn to Doctor Who. | ||
| 279 | 11:40 | Because in this -- | ||
| 280 | 11:42 | (Laughter) | ||
| 281 | 11:43 | as in so many other walks of life, | ||
| 282 | 11:44 | Doctor Who has already shown us the answer. | ||
| 283 | 11:47 | So I should say, for some of our foreign visitors: | ||
| 284 | 11:50 | Doctor Who is the greatest living scientist in England -- | ||
| 285 | 11:54 | (Laughter) | ||
| 286 | 11:56 | and a beacon of truth and enlightenment to all of us. | ||
| 287 | 11:58 | And this is Doctor Who with his "psychic paper." | ||
| 288 | 12:01 | Come on, you guys must have seen Doctor Who's "psychic paper." | ||
| 289 | 12:04 | You're not nerds if you say yes. | ||
| 290 | 12:06 | Who's seen Doctor Who's psychic paper? | ||
| 291 | 12:09 | Oh right, you were in the library the whole time studying, I guess. | ||
| 292 | 12:12 | Is that what you're going to tell us? | ||
| 293 | 12:14 | Doctor Who's psychic paper is: | ||
| 294 | 12:15 | when you hold up the psychic paper, | ||
| 295 | 12:17 | the person, in their brain, | ||
| 296 | 12:18 | sees the thing that they need to see. | ||
| 297 | 12:20 | So I want to show you a British passport, | ||
| 298 | 12:23 | I hold up the psychic paper, | ||
| 299 | 12:24 | you see a British passport. | ||
| 300 | 12:26 | I want to get into a party, | ||
| 301 | 12:27 | I hold up the psychic paper, | ||
| 302 | 12:29 | I show you a party invitation. | ||
| 303 | 12:30 | You see what you want to see. | ||
| 304 | 12:32 | So what I'm saying is, we need to make an electronic version of that, | ||
| 305 | 12:35 | but with one tiny, tiny change, | ||
| 306 | 12:38 | which is that it'll only show you the British passport | ||
| 307 | 12:40 | if I've actually got one. | ||
| 308 | 12:41 | It'll only show you the party invitation if I actually have one. | ||
| 309 | 12:44 | It will only show you that I'm over 18 if I actually am over 18. | ||
| 310 | 12:48 | But nothing else. | ||
| 311 | 12:49 | So you're the bouncer at the pub, you need to know that I'm over 18. | ||
| 312 | 12:54 | Instead of showing you my driving license, | ||
| 313 | 12:56 | which shows you I know how to drive, | ||
| 314 | 12:58 | what my name is, my address, all these kind of things, | ||
| 315 | 13:01 | I show you my psychic paper, | ||
| 316 | 13:02 | and all it tells you is, am I over 18 or not. | ||
| 317 | 13:06 | Right. | ||
| 318 | 13:07 | Is that just a pipe dream? | ||
| 319 | 13:08 | Of course not, otherwise I wouldn't be here talking. | ||
| 320 | 13:11 | So, in order to build that and make it work, | ||
| 321 | 13:13 | I'm only going to name these things, I'll not go into them: | ||
| 322 | 13:16 | we need a plan, | ||
| 323 | 13:17 | which is, we're going to build this as an infrastructure | ||
| 324 | 13:20 | for everybody to use to solve all of these problems. | ||
| 325 | 13:22 | We're going to make a utility. | ||
| 326 | 13:24 | The utility has to be universal, you can use it everywhere. | ||
| 327 | 13:27 | I'm just giving you little flashes of the technology as we go along. | ||
| 328 | 13:30 | That's a Japanese ATM, | ||
| 329 | 13:31 | the fingerprint template is stored inside the mobile phone. | ||
| 330 | 13:34 | So when you want to draw money out, | ||
| 331 | 13:36 | you put the phone on the ATM and touch your finger, | ||
| 332 | 13:38 | your fingerprint goes through to the phone, | ||
| 333 | 13:40 | the phone says, "Yes, that's whoever," | ||
| 334 | 13:42 | and the ATM then gives you some money. | ||
| 335 | 13:44 | It has to be a utility that you can use everywhere. | ||
| 336 | 13:47 | It has to be absolutely convenient. | ||
| 337 | 13:49 | That's me going into the pub. | ||
| 338 | 13:52 | All the device on the door of the pub is allowed is: | ||
| 339 | 13:55 | Is this person over 18 and not barred from the pub? | ||
| 340 | 13:59 | And so the idea is, you touch your ID card to the door, | ||
| 341 | 14:02 | and if I'm allowed in, it shows my picture, | ||
| 342 | 14:04 | if I'm not, it shows a red cross. | ||
| 343 | 14:05 | It doesn't disclose any other information. | ||
| 344 | 14:08 | It has to have no special gadgets. | ||
| 345 | 14:09 | That can only mean one thing, following on from Ross's statement, | ||
| 346 | 14:12 | which I agree with completely: if it means no special gadgets, | ||
| 347 | 14:15 | it has to run on a mobile phone. | ||
| 348 | 14:17 | That's the only choice we have, to make it work on mobile phones. | ||
| 349 | 14:20 | There are 6.6 billion mobile phone subscriptions. | ||
| 350 | 14:22 | My favorite statistic of all time: only 4 billion toothbrushes in the world. | ||
| 351 | 14:26 | That means something. I don't know what. | ||
| 352 | 14:28 | (Laughter) | ||
| 353 | 14:29 | I rely on our futurologists to tell me. | ||
| 354 | 14:31 | It has to be a utility which is extensible. | ||
| 355 | 14:33 | So it has to be something that anybody could build on. | ||
| 356 | 14:36 | Anybody should be able to use this infrastructure; | ||
| 357 | 14:38 | you don't need permissions, licenses, whatever. | ||
| 358 | 14:40 | Anyone should be able to write some code to do this. | ||
| 359 | 14:45 | Well, you know what symmetry is, so you don't need a picture of it. | ||
| 360 | 14:48 | This is how we're going to do it. | ||
| 361 | 14:50 | We're going to do it using phones and mobile proximity. | ||
| 362 | 14:52 | I'm going to suggest to you | ||
| 363 | 14:54 | the technology to implement Doctor Who's psychic paper is already here, | ||
| 364 | 14:57 | and if any of you have got one of the new Barclay's debit cards | ||
| 365 | 15:00 | with the contactless interface on it, | ||
| 366 | 15:02 | you've already got that technology. | ||
| 367 | 15:04 | Have you ever been up to the big city and used an Oyster card? | ||
| 368 | 15:07 | Does that ring a bell? | ||
| 369 | 15:09 | The technology already exists. | ||
| 370 | 15:10 | The first phones that have the technology built in -- | ||
| 371 | 15:12 | the Google Nexus, the S II, the Samsung Wave 578 -- | ||
| 372 | 15:15 | the first phones that have the technology built into them are already in the shops. | ||
| 373 | 15:19 | So the idea that the gasman can turn up at my mum's door, | ||
| 374 | 15:22 | and he can show my mum his phone, | ||
| 375 | 15:24 | and she can tap it with her phone, | ||
| 376 | 15:26 | and it'll come up with green if he really is from British Gas | ||
| 377 | 15:29 | and allowed in, | ||
| 378 | 15:30 | and will come up with red if he isn't, end of story. | ||
| 379 | 15:32 | We have the technology to do that. | ||
| 380 | 15:34 | And what's more, | ||
| 381 | 15:35 | although some of those things sound a bit counterintuitive, | ||
| 382 | 15:38 | like proving I'm over 18 without proving who I am, | ||
| 383 | 15:40 | the cryptography to do that not only exists, | ||
| 384 | 15:42 | it's extremely well-known and well-understood. | ||
| 385 | 15:44 | Digital signatures, the blinding of public key certificates -- | ||
| 386 | 15:47 | these technologies have been around for a while, | ||
| 387 | 15:50 | we've just had no way of packaging them up. | ||
| 388 | 15:52 | So the technology already exists. | ||
| 389 | 15:53 | We know it works. | ||
| 390 | 15:57 | There are a few examples of the technology being used | ||
| 391 | 15:59 | in experimental places. | ||
| 392 | 16:00 | That's London Fashion Week, | ||
| 393 | 16:02 | where we built a system with O2. | ||
| 394 | 16:04 | That's for the Wireless Festival in Hyde Park. | ||
| 395 | 16:06 | You can see the person's walking in with their VIP band, | ||
| 396 | 16:09 | it's being checked by the Nokia phone that's reading the band. | ||
| 397 | 16:12 | I'm only putting those up to show you these things are prosaic, | ||
| 398 | 16:15 | this stuff works in these environments. | ||
| 399 | 16:17 | They don't need to be special. | ||
| 400 | 16:18 | So finally, I know that you can do this, | ||
| 401 | 16:24 | because if you saw the Easter special of Doctor Who, | ||
| 402 | 16:28 | where he went to Mars in a bus -- | ||
| 403 | 16:32 | I should say, again, for our foreign students: | ||
| 404 | 16:34 | that doesn't happen in every episode. | ||
| 405 | 16:36 | This was a very special case. | ||
| 406 | 16:37 | So in the episode where he goes to Mars in a London bus -- | ||
| 407 | 16:40 | I can't show you the clip, | ||
| 408 | 16:42 | due to the outrageous restrictions of Queen Anne-style copyright | ||
| 409 | 16:45 | by the BBC -- | ||
| 410 | 16:46 | but in the episode where he goes to Mars in a London bus, | ||
| 411 | 16:49 | Doctor Who is clearly shown getting onto the bus | ||
| 412 | 16:53 | with the Oyster card reader | ||
| 413 | 16:54 | using his psychic paper. | ||
| 414 | 16:56 | Which proves that psychic paper has an NFC interface. | ||
| 415 | 16:59 | Thank you very much. | ||
| 416 | 17:01 | (Applause) |