(Un)Scientific American

For lunch I thought I’d go up to the Union shop, pick up a copy of Scientific American, go and sit in the Arts Center and have an informative but relaxing lunch-time. This months edition (March 07) showed much promise. Articles of note included an insight into Microsoft’s theory group & information on a “digital life” system that logged your every action. Two potentially brilliant articles, but somewhere along the line SA got it horribly wrong.

My main gripe is with the “digital life” article, but the basic problem exists in both. They read as if they’re a 6 page ad for Microsoft, there’s no objectivity. The source of this lies in the fact that the digital life article was written by Gordon Bell and Jim Gemmell. So what? Well the problem is that the software that the article is talking about was also written by Gordon Bell and Jim Gemmell. Hardly the best people to get to take an objective view on the system.

The idea of MyLifeBits (the software in question) is that it takes everything you do (and when I say everything, I mean everything) and stores it in some central database on your PC. This can then be queried at a later date for those times in your life when you forget important things (the article suggest the situation when you forget someone’s phone number *cough* phone-book?). As soon as I started to read this article the idea of storing so much sensitive personal information made me uneasy. But I persisted, thinking that this problem would be tackled at some point in the article. Unfortunately the more I read the more it started to sound like an advertisement for Microsoft and their revolutionary MyLifeBits software. Marketing speak started to creep in and the article got caught up in it’s own egotistical momentum. Hope was beginning to fade for any talk of possible security holes. After all why would they want to ruin this perfect opportunity to market their software with talk of possible problems?

To my suprise one of the last paragraphs of this advert article talked about the “critical” nature of guarding the privacy of what they cutely call “digital memories”. Alas, it went down hill from there. They started by saying that people already store a lot of “sensitive information” on their PCs. I’m sorry but I think storing everything you’ve ever done is a few steps up from storing some passwords and the odd bank record. They then go on to say that the design of the user interface is of up-most importance to stop people from “inadvertently distributing one’s medical records to the entire world”. To be honest I think the user interface is the least of their worries. Who in their right mind would use a piece of software that has the capabilities to do such a thing? The naivety of the authors on the seriousness of this subject is appalling. They manage to lose any credibility they have by ignoring one of the major downfalls of their software and painting a over-optimistic rose tinted vision of the digitally-memorised future.

So if you see MyLifeBits on the shelf in your local PC store, keep away, keep well, well away.