On the anniversary of Alan Turing’s death on June 7th 1954, Hong Kong Radio 3’s Phil Whelan and I looked at the past, present and future of encryption and paid homage to this incredible scientist and father of Artificial Intelligence. We also managed to squeeze in a few of the announcements made at Apple’s annual Word Developers Conference

Transcript from live recording on 23 June 20 – Hong Kong radio 3

[00:00:00] Phil Whelan: [00:00:00] Right here on radio three better, late than never, always fun because it’s time to say hello to Morris, miss Olansky in Melbourne Australia. How are

Morris Miselowski: [00:00:06] you? You’re very, very good. 

Phil Whelan: [00:00:10] that was, I was thinking how to describe what happened yesterday. Needless to say, I couldn’t hear of sausage. That Morris was saying, you don’t know Saifai movies.

When they put a sheep in like ant man, they put a sheep in the thing and it gets the particularized all over the place. Well, that’s what happened to your voice Morris.

Morris Miselowski: [00:00:26] It was most, probably a good thing.

Phil Whelan: [00:00:27] It’s probably going to happen in a minute anyway. So let’s get cracking yesterday. I wanted to ask you all about encryption yesterday was Alan Turing’s birthday and as sort of tenuous link to Apple, of course, because they’ve come out with some new stuff.

So really I’d like to start with encryption Morris security more than ever, especially in this part of the world is, on the top of everybody’s agenda. You are encrypted end to end. Well, am

Morris Miselowski: [00:00:54] I. Well, they want to make you believe it. That’s for sure. So the answer is most probably yes. Unless [00:01:00] somebody wants to crack in.

And that’s always the answer. So I mean, nothing, nothing in the digital space is absolutely a hundred million percent secure. We do the best we can. We’ve started to accept that we have cloud computing and many of us store our emails and things up in this production, real cloud, certainly banks, finance companies, those that really have a lot to lose by being hacked.

Also trust the cloud and versions. All the encryption. So it’s the best we know how to do with what we have, but there’s always somebody somewhere. Who’s trying to figure out a way around it. Before you explain

Phil Whelan: [00:01:34] to us what it is. You’ve just reminded me of another topic. Businesses for many, many years have had to be networked.

Everything has to be networked. There’s computer that well now we’ve got the cloud. Do they? Well

Morris Miselowski: [00:01:47] liquid working in the cloud. I’m not necessarily the same thing they can be. Network just means that all the computers, all the technology is connected to each other. Yeah. And that’s generally what it refers to.

So if you’re in a big space and there are [00:02:00] hundreds of people working that we all have centralized. Service, which means we’re all pulling from the same files, but generally what we refer to as networking about

Phil Whelan: [00:02:08] when the, in this day and age we can work, outside supposing we are in an artist advertising agency.

For instance, we could sit on the park bench and work on something very well. Obviously we’re not networked

Morris Miselowski: [00:02:19] there. Well, it’s a bit of both. So what we are, it depends on how we work, what that person is most probably pulling from is the cloud. Right? And we can as part of our network. So as part of the offices that we have, the physical offices, we can also have what might be looked at as digital offices, which are these cloud filing systems.

All we’re doing is digitizing it. We’re putting up into space, so to speak. It’s not technically there. And anybody, anywhere on any device with commission can download it. That’s the extension of what’s happened now, and it took us a good four or five years to get really comfortable that it exists. And it must probably is as safe as anything we have.

Phil Whelan: [00:02:57] just put safety aside for one second. So, [00:03:00] in our advertising agency, we want to be as creative as possible. We’re using iPads, we’re using tablets, this, that, and the other, is safety a concern there if we’re just working on an artistic project, for instance, or we are dealing with corporate espionage.

Morris Miselowski: [00:03:14] The answer is again, a bit each way, because it really depends on the hacker and how interesting you are as a person. Remember these hackers really? Don’t, they’re not looking for an individual. Most of them are not looking for an individual. They’re just looking for the score. And more often than not, this is a really wide net equivalent of fishing.

Absolutely. The same. A really wide net that they’re throwing and they’re capturing all kinds of people in it. Most of those people, they don’t know, they’re not looking at the individual files. They’re just doing mischief with what they’re doing.

Phil Whelan: [00:03:43] Is that what phishing with a pH is?

Morris Miselowski: [00:03:46] no, but it’s kind of similar.

So it does refer to the same kind of thing. It’s unusual, but not necessarily, you know, not the case that hackers will go after an individual. There has to be a reason or a purpose. Yeah. And they must probably [00:04:00] will go after a government or somewhere specific because there is a purpose there.

Phil Whelan: [00:04:04] Yeah, that makes a lot of sense myself here, Morris.

So I’ll try not to interrupt you in a minute. let’s go back to, the, the sort of safety of the encryption and everything and what it means when I opened my WhatsApp, it tells me I’m encrypted. It doesn’t mean a lot to me. Yeah. Except somehow the hint is that I’m safe.

Morris Miselowski: [00:04:23] Well, encryption is exactly what they’re doing is putting magic sauce into what the candidate splits.

The file up, sends it in all sorts of directions and makes it impossible for people to get inside of it, except that people are to win or the multiple people at either end of it. So that if we think of it, it’s the old fashioned thing where you have two cans and a bit of string in between, which is what we used to use as little children.

I used to use to have that bit of that bit of walkie talkie stuff. Yeah. If you kind of use that, what they’ve said is that the string between the two cans is impenetrable. Nobody can get into that space. Doesn’t matter to got a pair of scissors or an X or whatever else you’re not getting in. So therefore only the people.

[00:05:00] Phil Whelan: [00:05:00] So it reminds me of scissors, paper stone, because one will destroy the other.

Morris Miselowski: [00:05:04] Yeah. I mean, it’s not a great analogy, but it kind of works in my head to explain what the encryption is.

Phil Whelan: [00:05:10] Yeah. I mean, is it, is it also for these big companies, is it kind of a flashy thing to say to people because they have complete

Morris Miselowski: [00:05:17] illusion?

I mean, you, you would not even begin to do anything in this cloud space, unless you believed it was encrypted, unless you believed it was safe. If somebody could hack it or somebody can get into it for whatever reason, then it’s probably not something a business wants.

Phil Whelan: [00:05:33] I think, I think what I’m, what I meant by that is for us buying these gadgets, you, you hear a lot of, you hear a lot of, buzzwords.

They put a lot of funky language on these machines and somehow you feel good.

Morris Miselowski: [00:05:45] And that’s what they’re meant to do. It really is just, as you said, the feeling I’ve, we’ve always talked about the necessity to be safe, online, not give away your passwords, you know, change them as often as possible. Encryption is just another one of those things.

I would always prefer to use an [00:06:00] encrypted bit of software over something that’s not right, because I believe it’s more likely that they won’t be able to crack it. And most software, most apps, most websites we’re going to now are encrypted. Right.

Phil Whelan: [00:06:12] So is it always the case basically at the high end of all of this stuff, if somebody really wants to get into what you’re doing, they will, you probably saw the news out of Australia last week when the prime minister talked about something like a sophisticated state actor.

Of course, he was probably hinting at China, and the all but admitted that. but they, they, you know, if they want to come and get you, they’re going to come and get your surely.

Morris Miselowski: [00:06:31] And that’s absolutely look, it’s no different from a hundred years ago, 300 years ago, when a bankrupt will walk into a bank or, or held up with a carriage on the road or whatever else, it really isn’t any different at all.

Except this has done quite comfortably from another country. That’s the big difference it can be done from anywhere on the planet, any time of the day. And also the other side of it is that often you don’t know you’ve been hacked immediately. So they’ve gone in, they’ve often taken things which are files and information, and you might not know it for a while.

[00:07:00] Phil Whelan: [00:06:59] It’s interesting, Morris, is that when you talk about this, you say these guys do it for sport. And the only time we see really applied hacking is in the movies. Where does reality and movie

Morris Miselowski: [00:07:08] meet? Yeah, I shouldn’t be using the word sport that often, but to me, it’s, it’s all of those people. And there are literally businesses that are around the globe who hack.

There are businesses that we think we’re aware of in particular countries where they do that, where people are skilled and taught how to break in. Are they

Phil Whelan: [00:07:26] like mystery shoppers for big companies?

Morris Miselowski: [00:07:29] well, they’re, they’re even more nefarious than that. They, these are the equivalent of the old, you know, the all gangs used to walk around the street and pickpocket, or were taught to steal from, you know, from the early age, it’s kind of a career that they have.

And there are literally hundreds of thousands of people on the planet. We think that you live in live event, work in this space in our world, trained in it,

Phil Whelan: [00:07:48] Oliver analogy. I mean, you know, the artful Dodger dip in pockets and stuff is the majority of this stuff. probability involved in it, a chance involved in it.

Morris Miselowski: [00:07:58] Again, it depends on who the hacking. [00:08:00] So definitely. Absolutely. You can, you can buy a hacker, you can rent a hack. Yeah. And you go into the black, into the dark way to do that. So you can find them in the same way that you can go onto Craigslist. Not that they have them or any of the other ones. Sites. So that’s totally possible.

And in those sites, or if you were able to find someone else somewhere else, I would guess that you would be putting in specific requests. I’ll attach this company, heck this person, but there is a whole lot of other people who are, who are hacking because they’re able to put things in people’s emails or.

Put things on people’s websites and often those come in the form of ransoms. So we know what you’re doing, or you want to be able to get into your website or we’ve locked you out. Okay. So they’re putting messages out that are meant to put fear into us. And the only way that we can overcome them is normally by paying some kind of ransom.

Those tend to be more general, even though they feel very, very specific. To us, they tend to be a more general phishing [00:09:00] exercise

Phil Whelan: [00:09:01] nicely to our next topic Morris. So yesterday I wanted to talk about Alan Turing as well. So I’m thinking like when was the very first incidence of computer hacking and I’m not sure if you’ll agree that the bomb was actually a computer, but the bit of trivial I was churning out yesterday was that the sum total throughout the entire second world war.

of computing power, but he had an 180 of these things. It was roughly equal to one iPhone playing 10 seconds of YouTube throughout the entire war from 180 bombs. Crazy. Isn’t it.

Morris Miselowski: [00:09:32] Isn’t it, but imagine how wonderful they thought the world was during that. Yeah. When ready to do that again, it’s the same thing.

It just keeps evolving and evolving computers have been around forever. I’ve argued that the advocates and other things really are the first versions of the computer, because all they are is a piece of technology that counts for you. And of course, I’ve gotten far more sophisticated ever since then. So we’ve had them for a long time and the way that we think about them with the valves and the big machines and the things that do a bit of thinking they’ve been around since about the [00:10:00] thirties.

Phil Whelan: [00:10:00] Well, if you, if you have a look back to yesterday, yeah. Silly pick I’d put up with Morris behind him is in fact, one of Alan Turing’s bombs with an ear at the end. I mentioned this cause it was his birthday yesterday. He was born in 1912. Do you know much about this gadget Morris? I

Morris Miselowski: [00:10:15] don’t. I mean, I only what I’ve read and what’s interesting about touring is that we often think about him as, as the encryption and doing all those incredible things with being able to, to crack the code for the Germans and shorten the war.

But it’s also talked about quite fondly as being one of the ladies, not deficient intelligence. Interesting, because when he. When he began his work in the thirties and forties, even though it wasn’t called that. And it wasn’t what we envisioned it today. He was trying to get a computer to do human thinking.

And when you think about this touring thing, which was trying to crack the code and getting the computer to think about it’s artificial intelligence,

Phil Whelan: [00:10:54] Yeah, I guess. So he, it was the first to do many of these things. His method was called, [00:11:00] deterring machine. I’m not sure if that was the sort of philosophy of, he was a philosopher too, and a biologist, by the way.

the Turing machine was that the principle that he put into the bomb, if you like.

Morris Miselowski: [00:11:10] Yeah, absolutely. So it was the principal. He used to be able to crack the code and do all kinds of other things. It was a machine that he built and that, that movie, again, his name escapes me. He’s a really one, I don’t know how true it is, but the wonderful depiction of what was happening around that time.

Phil Whelan: [00:11:23] Well, to take this even further, Morris, this does talk about one other technology, which is fantastic clockwork. I mean, it’s clockwork that I’m talking about. That’s what this thing functioned on. I mean, there’s an amazing piece of engineering. That’s just gone in so many directions.

Morris Miselowski: [00:11:38] Yeah, it has. I mean, those little Springs inside of a wristwatch and inside of a clock where we’re incredible.

It’s also the thing. Again, the mechanisms inside of a clock. That allowed us to travel the globe and know where we are. It was the mechanism from inside the watch that they put into the machine, into those machines. They used to take on board on ships in the [00:12:00] 18 hundreds that allowed them to work at longitude and latitude.

Phil Whelan: [00:12:03] There’s a brilliant application. I think the thing about clockwork is wherever you are providing the machine itself, isn’t destroyed. It’s going to work. Have you ever heard of Trevor Bayliss who invented the windup radio?

Morris Miselowski: [00:12:15] No,

Phil Whelan: [00:12:16] that is a piece of work. And the point is, if you’re in the, if you’re anywhere where shortwave or whatever signals can reach you, you just wind it up.

Yup. I think it saved a lot of people’s sanity and maybe even live this as the years have gone by. Yeah.

Morris Miselowski: [00:12:29] And I quite like the old fashioned notion, remember the watches, it used to do the same thing when you moved your arm. Yeah. They recharge themselves. And nowadays we’re all about batteries and battery life.

As long as you have an arm and it’s moving you, but your watch always worked. W

Phil Whelan: [00:12:42] wristwatch technology is not always gone in the right direction, certainly in the early 1980s to tell the time on an led, what you had to stop and push a button. Yeah,

Morris Miselowski: [00:12:51] it was incredible. And the story from nothing but about that.

I remember when I, yeah, yeah. Watches with [00:13:00] calculators had come on. It was the first time ever. And I was literally coming out of Hong Kong with my parents and they had bought me one. It was a great gimmick. I mean, in those days it was very, very unusual. I brought it back to school and had played with it next class and had a confiscated by my math teacher.

You said I was cheating. And wasn’t allowed to bring it to class anymore. And that was the calculator and not so much to watch. That’s how far we’ve come.

Phil Whelan: [00:13:20] Yeah. Well, and another interesting it’s all bubbles here. It jumps from one topic to another. So the watch was light emitting, diode and led. And that now has amazing uses certainly in the broadcasting area.

So it’s a long, a long way from the little red bars that change on your wrist. Isn’t

Morris Miselowski: [00:13:36] it. Yeah, absolutely. But this talks about innovation and innovation is looking at what we currently do and wondering if there’s a better way to do it, but the end result is always, yeah, the assignment. That’s pretty much what we do through humanity.

We’re always trying to repurpose, reinvent what we need. Yeah. With the tools and technologies we have at hand.

Phil Whelan: [00:13:53] Right. Let’s let’s get to the final paragraph here. Maurice, obviously people talk about apples and Alan Turing. And you said to me, you [00:14:00] wanted to mention what the tech company has been coming up with.

So what have you got?

Morris Miselowski: [00:14:04] Well, we do, we always do our annual wrap up of what’s of what’s out in about, this is the annual wrap-up from Apple. It was the WWDC, the worldwide developers conference held at yesterday. It talks about all things Apple for the next year. It’s not so much about the devices that’s yeah.

During the year, this is about the software and the way it’s going to work it’s for the developers so that they know what sort of apps and websites and things they should be dreaming about over the next while. So Apple talked about a new iOS, which is the operating system for it, and that. New iOS. So that should be available for download fairly quickly.

We’ll give people a very different look and feel on their phones. It will have new versions of apps in it, which will self select themselves into categories. So a little bit of filing for you and put themselves away so that they’re always together or the finance ones are together.

Phil Whelan: [00:14:54] How do they come up with this most?

Do they just sit down in a room and say, what can we do? Or do they actually base it on customer [00:15:00] feedback? Do you think.

Morris Miselowski: [00:15:01] So my usual answer to that is they wait for Android users like me. Who’d been at that for the last seven or eight years and put it into Apple. Oh, wow. See, she’s answered. This is not new for its new for Apple.

And it’s new for its new for hardcore Apple. So you could always, you could always download this sort of opportunity with Apple. But they’ve actually had baked it into the, into the software. So

Phil Whelan: [00:15:23] I think we all get stuck in certain operating systems because of what we use. I use a lot of audio stuff and they, and it’s not on Android.

I have to use Apple because they’re brilliant apps. I mean, I think I would possibly change if it was there.

Morris Miselowski: [00:15:35] Yeah. And I’m kinda the same. I switched between the normal PC, the windows and Apple. I do all of my editing, all of my recording onto Apple, because as you say, the software is only available for the Apple.

And then I do all of the business stuff on the PC.

Phil Whelan: [00:15:51] Yeah. Well, I mean, I must add that the apps I’m using. They’re fantastic. No question. Anyway, what else, what else

Morris Miselowski: [00:15:56] did they come up with? You’re talking about an airport update at the [00:16:00] airport, the things you put in your ears, there’ll be new software coming out to that.

And that’s going to give you surround sound, which is something you’re always keen on.

Phil Whelan: [00:16:08] How many people fund though? Most surround sound for fun. I mean, it’s, it’s, it’s a hard thing to take in all the time and you need headphones by the way.

Morris Miselowski: [00:16:16] And just to make it even more sexy from Apple’s viewpoint, it’s going to use your gyroscope and the phone sensor to figure out where you are and where you position them, where your head is and do all of those calculations for you.

So you’re always getting optimum sounds.

Phil Whelan: [00:16:30] I see what you mean. Yeah. I’ll have a look into that.

Morris Miselowski: [00:16:33] You’d love that because we’re not hearing about it.

Phil Whelan: [00:16:36] No, I’ll have a look into that. You know, that whole thing about binaural sound. When you’re supposed to hear things just as a human would they design things so that it definitely comes from one side and the other side, and there’s almost a blank spot in the middle.

I mean, this is all fun, but not when you’re on the bus listening to Duran Duran.

Morris Miselowski: [00:16:51] So, so I’ll wait for your review on

whether or not. The Apple watch. I mean, I get [00:17:00] that lots of stuff. The Apple watch is going to get a whole new thing around fitness, which has become a big deal. It’s also going to give you if you’re a bicyclist, a directions. So the equivalent of the equivalent of Apple maps will now come through your, through your watch as you’re cycling.

Phil Whelan: [00:17:18] How are they running out of stuff here? Cause it seems like they were digging deep for some of these gadgets.

Morris Miselowski: [00:17:23] Well, they’re, they’re, they’re really digging. They are digging deep. They’re digging deep to make sure that they have given us all the things that people are used to having, putting it all into devices that are easy to use.

There is nothing remembered. This is not the hardware. This is the software, but there’s nothing revolutionary. So to speak, it’s all good, necessary stuff that will make a big difference to end users. But there wasn’t really earth shattering, never seen it before going to make an incredible change to the world stuff.

Phil Whelan: [00:17:49] So I’m just flicking through. I’m just flicking through a bit of news here. A headline I’m looking at from two days ago, Apple Mac computers make jumped to its own chips. Is that big deals?

Morris Miselowski: [00:17:59] Well, it is for [00:18:00] Apple and it is for the way that we might go ahead. So Apple used to use Intel for the last 10 or 11 years as did most companies for their chips, the things that make the computers work inside over the last few years, they’ve gone on the spending spree, literally billions of dollars buying chip companies, not Intel.

Yeah. And they have decided in this version, which, which was well expected, not necessarily now, but everybody knew it was going to happen, that they would from here on out, only use their own chips inside their machines, which means they’re now purpose built for max in whatever way it is. This is ordinary on the iPhone and the iPad.

I use their own chips on those. This is really pushing into the laptops, computers and other spaces.

Phil Whelan: [00:18:39] And it makes sense to do that though. I mean, you’ve seen in the past avionics companies, they’ve just said, wow, we’ve got to stop buying these Boeing engines. Let’s make our own. And the rest is history.

Morris Miselowski: [00:18:48] It does, when it comes down to what sort of company you are and whether you are accompanying the producers or whether you just make the technology and for Apple, for a long time, they would not enter these spare parts as necessarily they were, they were really [00:19:00] into the thinking into the envisioning and into the packaging.

So they’re making that move. What they’re doing is now moving into a vertical market, which simply means yes, now they want to control as much of the things that they use themselves.

Phil Whelan: [00:19:13] So when are we going to get the next edition of hardware?

Morris Miselowski: [00:19:17] We don’t know, it’s probably not. The asset will be out around September, October.

There are always announcements out there. If you want to have, if you want to have a look at the site that tells you the scuttlebutt, it’s called Mac rumors. Okay.

Phil Whelan: [00:19:28] We’ll check that out. I’ve got to go now. Morris Mac rumors, easy to Google, right? Easy to search

Morris Miselowski: [00:19:33] each a.com it’s been around forever. And it’s where, it’s where everybody that wants to know the latest Mac rumours has go to.

It’s quite, you know, it’s not official official site, nothing to do with Mac, but everybody knows it’s pretty much where. The bodies are buried.

Phil Whelan: [00:19:45] All right, Morris. Well, it’s nearly time for us to get to the news. Thanks as always, really appreciate you playing ball today. And I catch up with you next Tuesday.

Bye bye. For now, Morris Miselowski.