Art Bell introduces Peter Cochrane, former British Telecom Research executive, who explores RFID’s passive tracking—embedded in passports, goods, or even human skin—to curb crime via encrypted transponders. Cochrane dismisses privacy fears, noting 45M UK phones already monitor movements daily, and proposes border tech like infrared cameras and drones to replace understaffed checkpoints. He warns VoIP could collapse telcos into low-margin services while Hollywood’s $10B industry struggles against piracy, with Bollywood and pornography outpacing it. Quantum cryptography offers theoretical security, but Cochrane doubts perfection, suggesting complexity deters attacks temporarily. Ultimately, tech-driven disruption forces industries to adapt or risk irrelevance, balancing security gains against ethical concerns. [Automatically generated summary]
I did you all good evening, good morning, good afternoon, wherever you may be in the world's prolific time zones, every single one of them covered by this radio program called Ghost AM.
I'm Mark Bell Honor, and it is indeed my pleasure to be carrying you through the weekend.
And what a night it's going to be coming up in the next hour.
Peter Cofferman and some uncommon scents.
We'll talk more about that.
On my webcam tonight is a shot of me at 13 years old.
13 years of age.
And I just started thinking about this a little bit tonight.
I am going to repeat something about my big, my hobby all my life since, well, since then.
I mean, go look at that photograph.
I was 13 then.
I will be 60 years of age in June.
So I just computed that I have been a continuously licensed ham radio operator since I was 13 or almost 47 years.
I remember how I used to look up to old timers when I was liking that picture there.
And now I is one.
So I've been around for a while.
At any rate, to repeat what I did last night, and I know this is somewhat of a narrow cast.
It's for a lot of you ham radio operators out there.
And by the way, for a lot of you who would like to become ham radio operators, there is the American Radio Relay League.
And you can contact them and they will help you.
Find a local club or something like that.
It's the very same organization I'm about to chat about a little bit here in a way.
There's been this giant advance in ham radio.
And by the way, through the years, all the years, ham radio has led the way.
Ham radio, you might want to know, ham operators were the first broadcasters, down on the broadcast band.
Did you know that?
The very same AM broadcast band you're probably listening to right now.
The hams were there first because the government thought it was worthless territory, you know, worthless bandwidth.
But it wasn't.
And we proved it, and when we proved it, they took it away.
And now you have the AM radio band.
And we have been cast into the shorter waves that they thought, again, were no good.
But the hams, again, proved they were good.
And that you could, in fact, hunk around the world on the short waves.
And then, of course, came the influx of shortwave broadcasters and everything else.
So hams have always been first.
And they're first, again.
There's something new under the sun.
It's that simple.
Big advance.
It's a gigantic advance in single sideband communications.
We used to have AM, like you're listening to on the AM band, and they decided, well, that was too wide.
Still some do it.
But they decided that was too wide, and single sideband would be the way to go.
And frankly, single sideband has always sort of sounded like Donald Duck.
You've probably seen it in movies, you know.
They a lot of times will show ham operators in movies, and it sounds a little like Donald Duck, right?
And indeed, to just the average ear, and I'll ask you all, you're about to get a demonstration, and you tell me which is easier to listen to, which would be less fatiguing to listen to if you had to listen to it for a long time.
Both of these demonstrations, just for clarity, are me, my voice, recorded by the same station who's located about 900 miles away from me in Salem, Oregon.
Ben recorded this.
The first is standard, old-fashioned single sideband at 2.4 kilohertz.
And frankly, it sounds a little kinny.
A little Donald duckish, right?
But then the second one you're going to hear is this new ESSB, which, oh, granted, takes up a tiny bit more bandwidth.
Not much.
A little.
But it sounds so much better.
In fact, so much better it may induce some people to want to get into hem radio.
Listen to the difference.
Again, this is recorded 900 miles away.
My voice.
Here it is the way it usually is broadcast.
unidentified
All right.
This is W60BB in Prop, Nevada, with a brief recording at standard bandwidth of 2.4.
Hello test 1234.
Once again, this is a recording at a standard bandwidth generally used at 6.
And it has the whole HAM community kind of jumping up and down, to be honest with you.
In fact, it's such a big advance that already, as usual, HAM's developed it, but now the FCC just authorized the shortwave broadcasters, you know, like Radio Brazil or whatever, Radio Moscow, whatever.
They're going to start using it now because it works so well.
Plus, you know, the FCC in a recent ruling said that it would not regulate ham radio by bandwidth, so we hope it doesn't.
I mean, what we want to happen here is nothing.
Here's the bottom line: ham radio is and has always been and must always be, in my opinion, an experimental radio service.
Hello out there!
Experimental.
And so this American Radio Relay League proposal to regulate by bandwidth is going to handcuff amateur radio operators.
Come on, folks, we're experimental here.
If you regulate us like you do broadcast stations or two-way services, then we can't experiment.
It cuts off part of our ability to experiment.
We don't want that.
So well-intentioned as it may be, the American Radio Relay League, this proposal to the FCC to handcuff the hams by cutting off their bandwidth is crazy.
Absolutely crazy.
And I hope they think better of it and just don't even submit the proposal.
That would be best of all.
But if they do, I don't think the FCC is going to pass.
They've already said they wouldn't do it.
Anyway, anybody interested in knowing more about this?
Here's one more thing, just before I leave it.
In this proposal, it sort of forgets we're experimental.
I mean, what if two or three years from now we come up with this really cool new voice digital mode, but uh-oh, it takes four kilohertz.
Then we would have shot ourselves in the foot.
So all we're asking for is no new law, no new regulation.
Leave things as they are.
Ham operators have always gotten along just fine in the bands, and they're gentlemen.
They'll find a way to do it here.
And additionally, we're not talking about much more bandwidth, but just a little more bandwidth, right?
Just a little more makes so much difference.
And what you heard was recorded on a standard ICOM receiver, 3.6.
And the difference between this and between this.
Good evening.
This is W6Oskar.
There you go.
So that's the difference.
And it's striking.
And hopefully you can hear it on your AM or FM radios.
One last thing for anybody wanting to know more about ESSB, the better way to do sideband, I would like you to go to a website.
It's NU9N.
That's NancyUnited9Nancy.com.
Very easy.
You can do it right now.
NU9N.
NancyUnited9Nancy.
NU9N.
And when you get there, you'll see NU9AM and ESSB hi-fi audio.
And just click on MPEG-3, MP3, and it's a pull-down menu.
And you can hear different examples of how much better Saiband really can sound.
So again, like so many things these days, all we're asking is that nothing happen, no new draconian rules or regulations or any of that be imposed.
And so I hope the average person was able to bear with me through this, and I hope the hams out there who heard it get excited and give it a try.
And again, if you want to and you want to learn more about what it takes, NU9N, NancyUnited9Nancy.com is the place to go.
We'll be right back, and we'll explore the, well, not wonderful world news.
Again, and one last time, amateur radio operators Hamzer, experimenters.
Don't change that.
A lot of technical advances have come our way because of experimenters and people who would change that.
I don't know.
All right.
Let's see.
A car bomb.
Almost always, when you start the news, you start this way.
A car bomb obliterated a tent packed with mourners at the funeral of a Kurdish officer in northern Iraq on Sunday, killing 25, wounding more than 50 in the single deadliest attack since the insurgents started bearing down on Iraq's newly formed government last week.
It's been several really bloody days in a row in Iraq, and one wonders when and if this will ever end.
On what was supposed to be her wedding day, Jennifer Wilbanks wore not a white veil, but an orange towel over her head to prevent the media from taking her picture instead of being led down the aisle by her dad.
She's led by police to an airplane that flew the runway bride home.
Now, officials say the 32-year-old woman's cold feet may have gotten her in hot water.
On Sunday, Gwynnette County District Attorney Danny Porter vowed to look into whether she had violated the law by reporting a crime that didn't exist.
I guess she said she was, you know, kidnapped and couldn't get married as a result.
Cold feet.
Bad move.
South Korea on Monday played down the significance of a North Korean missile test the day before, saying it involved a short-range missile without nuclear capabilities and warning against linking that issue to a dispute over the North atomic, the North's rather atomic ambitions.
North Korea apparently test-fired a missile into the Sea of Japan on Sunday, raising new fears about Pyongyang's nuclear intentions just days after a U.S. intelligence officer said the secret of Stalin's state could arm a missile with a nuclear warhead.
So they're still at it.
Every now and then they fire one off into the Sea of Japan.
Massachusetts highest court hears a bid Monday to halt same-sex couples from marrying until voters can weigh in on the issue.
In the contentious matter of gays getting married, a lawsuit filed by C.J. Doyle, Executive Director of the Catholic Action League of Massachusetts, claims the marriages interfere with voters' ability to participate in the debate on a proposed constitutional ban of same-sex marriages.
Around 5,000 same-sex couples have married in that state since the Supreme Court issued its landmark 4-3 ruling.
That was back in November of 2003 allowing gay marriages.
The ruling took effect, May of 2004.
Now, last night, I made a very brief comment about Social Security, and I said it was my understanding that the President said that we would begin to means test for Social Security.
And I said, well, you know, that makes it sound like a welfare program.
Oh, that brought plenty of response.
In fact, like this.
One of them, anyway.
Mr. Bell, you sounded like a totally ignorant jackass with your reference to President Bush's Social Security program.
It has nothing to do with welfare.
You might want to understand what you are talking about before you start your mouth flapping.
My 12-year-old son understands a plan better than you do.
Robert in Tulsa.
Robert, you should have your son call, and he can explain it to all of us then.
You see, perhaps what I said was an exaggeration, but maybe not.
When they began Social Security, it was kind of as an insurance policy for your older years.
They used the word insurance.
That makes one think of insurance.
And to be sure, you pay into it all your life, right?
All your working life.
You pay all of that money into Social Security.
So it's your money, right?
And now they're thinking that when people get to retirement age, they should be means tested.
And if they don't need the money, they don't get it.
they don't need it, then they give it to someone who needs it.
Well, that turns into what you Well, it's a welfare program.
By even a fairly strict definition, that fits, right?
I think that's a poor idea.
Actually, you see, there'd be plenty of money for everybody in their retirement years if the government hadn't been stealing from the fund all the time and putting it into the general fund with sort of an IOU that nobody ever intended to pay back.
Come on.
That's why they're having trouble with Social Security because they stole money from it.
And then you get these cockamami ideas about putting money into the stock market, people's retirement money into the stock market.
That's a great idea.
If you're an elected official, it's a great idea because if it fails, then you can say, oh, GC, you made a poor investment.
And you're off the hook.
Otherwise, when the whole system collapses, will anybody think about all the money stolen from it by our government?
So anyway, maybe I don't understand Social Security properly, and perhaps this 12-year-old needs to get on here and explain it to us all.
Hey, Art, how about you put out a request for an alternative energy or a X Prize when somebody comes up with some sort of free energy device?
Well, let me say this.
It's an interesting idea, but you don't need to have an X Prize for somebody who comes up with a free energy device.
If they come up with a free energy device, then they're going to be an instant billionaire.
And so they will indeed get their reward.
Some scientists say humans can read minds.
I thought this was most interesting.
Empathy allows us to feel the emotions of other people, to identify and understand their feelings and motives and see things from their perspective.
How we generate empathy remains a subject of intense debate in cognitive science.
Some scientists now believe they may finally have discovered its root.
We're all essentially mind readers, they say.
The idea has been slow to gain acceptance, but evidence is mounting.
In 1996, three neuroscientists were probing the brain of a monkey when they stumbled across a curious cluster of cells in the premotor cortex.
That would be an area of the brain responsible for planning movements.
Now listen carefully.
The cluster of cells fired not only when the monkey performed an action, but likewise when the monkey saw the same action performed by someone else.
The cells responded the same way, whether the monkey reached out to grasp a peanut or merely watched in envy as another monkey or human might have done so.
Because the cells reflected the actions that the monkey observed in others, the neuroscientists named them mirror neurons, mirror.
Later experiments confirmed the existence of mirror neurons in humans and revealed another surprise.
In addition to mirroring actions, the cells reflected sensations and emotions as well.
Wow.
A mere neuron suggests that we pretend to be in another person's mental shoes, according to a neuroscientist at the University of California Los Angeles School of Medicine.
In fact, with mere neurons, we do not have to pretend we practically are in another person's mind.
So in other words, we're on to the beginning of what might be mind reading.
And it may well be that, I mean, here's another example.
Science beginning to close in on what the rest of us have always, you know, considered to be something freaky, parapsychological, off in the world of strange.
And now all of a sudden, science is beginning to go, aha, There may be something to it.
Remember yesterday I read a report indicating oil could well go to $380 a barrel by the year 2015.
Several people computed, almost all of them coming up with roughly the same figure of $14.
It would be $14 or so.
At the pump, that's rough, but several people came up with that.
Oh, here's a good one.
A state Senate committee approved a proposal Tuesday that would put serial numbers on every handgun bullet made or sold in the state of California.
The measure cleared the Senate Public Safety Committee on a 42 vote over opposition from manufacturers, firearms dealers, and sports shooters.
The technology exists to listen to this laser-cut bullets with a number that police could then use to trace who purchased bullets used in a specific crime.
Purchasers would pay up to half a cent per bullet, half a penny for each one of your bullets, to fully record the number.
Vendors would pay about $50 a year, and of course, Attorney General Bill Locklear says we're going to solve a lot of crimes if this becomes law.
So there you have it.
Bullets with numbers on them.
Traceable numbers.
I don't know.
I've heard of worse ideas, really.
If it hits a target, so what?
If it hits a person, you've got a way to trace it.
I'm Art Bell.
unidentified
You get a shiver in the dark.
It's raining in the park.
Meantime.
Time of the river, you're stopping your hole.
Everything I'm going to fix it, double fall.
We'll be right back.
A night step inside, but you don't see too many faces.
Coming in out of the rain, they hear the jazz go down.
Competition, you know, the city in the middle of the dry spell.
You know, if the power lines were radiating broadband Internet everywhere, it would threaten all of the shortwave bans.
No question about it.
Now, here's what's happened since it passed, essentially.
A lot of companies have done startups.
You know, they've tried it.
And they've had so many interference complaints, and it's been such a we think that broadband over a power line is going to fail for a number of reasons.
we don't think it's economically feasible, number one, because there's so many things in place.
Now, I mean, God, you can get cable, you can get satellite, you can get microwave, you can get all kinds of services, and so I don't know that you need it over the power lines.
And two, it creates havoc.
So a lot of companies, I think, have chosen not to proceed until the atmosphere clears a little bit.
Let me put it that way.
unidentified
Okay.
Well, I think you've answered my question.
I wondered how that would affect how the average if that became reality, how that would affect how the average person interacts with the Internet and so forth.
Well, that's a very all it's really a good question.
There are even intrusive issues to talk about with it.
Thank you very much, BPL.
That would mean that there would be Internet on all your electrical outlets, and they would make machines that would be smart and would report when you needed more milk or something.
And you'd get an email.
Your refrigerator says, please get some more milk.
You know, that sort of thing.
It would also be incredibly, possibly intrusive in that all kinds of things could be reported from inside your house that you might not want reported.
Put it that way.
Wildcard line, you're on the air.
Hello.
unidentified
Hello, Arpell?
Yes.
Hey, I finally got through.
Yes.
Real quick question.
It's kind of off the beaten path tonight of what you're talking about.
The supernatural question there.
The Amityville house out there in Amityville, Long Island.
A few years ago, you had two pictures on your website.
One picture was of their crop formations, and I think it was either in England or here in America.
And NASA had sent out a signal into space in the mid-70s, and if decoded, it would resemble a picture of a man, our DNA structure, and then dots along the bottom representing how we viewed our solar system.
And well, when I ended up coming, the crop formation showed up, I'm almost certain I read that the DNA structure that it was changed just a little bit, and also the solar system was.
And I was wondering, you know, maybe that had anything to do with the DNA God code thing, because that was a very fascinating issue.
He refers, of course, to the crop circles that manifested and appeared to be an answer to the Voyager business, if not the transmitted signal from Arecibo.
Really, really fascinating stuff, no question about it.
West of the Rockies, you're on the air.
Good morning.
unidentified
Hi, Art.
Hi.
First thing, that 12-year-old, before he explains it to us, maybe he should explain it to the president.
After that, that girl you had on about the girl that was talking about her near-death experience.
The problem I had with her, I heard your first interview with her.
And the problem I had was she said that after the accident, she was in the hospital with the trach tube in, and she had to write notes down to the nurses.
Right.
And then after she got out, she had to learn how to read again, like starting with Dick Jane and whatever the dog's name was.
How could she write notes to the nurses if she had to learn to read and write again?
It may be a lot of times, sir, people have, when they're in the hospital for something as serious as she was in for, you know, and nearly dying, while you're in the hospital, all kinds of things can happen.
You can have a stroke or a series of mini-that's not how it came across.
Oh, my gosh, Art Bell, it's so good to talk to you.
I've been a listener for the last 11 years, and I'm finally getting to talk to the man.
Well, here you are.
So I just wanted to, I caught a little of the show last night, and it's kind of funny because I started to get interested In ham radio, and I set foot into a ham radio store yesterday.
And the gentleman in there were a little startled to see a woman interested in this, and I'm wondering what the deal is with that.
Well, I'm the one that fast blasted you probably about three months ago or so.
I was telling you about the I was just waking up that morning, the morning of November 30th, and a deep strong voice spoke, and I woke up, and it said he had 910 days left.
But I knew that, you know, I instantly knew that it meant to live.
And it worries me.
And I guess pretty much what I'd like to know is, you know, even if your callers could call in through the week, I listen, you know, during the first hour.
And if anybody knows anything about that, I'd appreciate it if they could comment.
Well, in a vague way, it is, in the sense that it's a sideband.
But no, not precisely.
It would take quite a bit of explanation to bring you up to speed, you know, to bring a non-technical person up to speed.
But here, I guess I can try.
Originally, we had AM, amplitude modulation, that's what Ham's used, just like you hear on the AM band now.
And then it was discovered that if you eliminated the carrier and one sideband, that you ended up with something that was called single sideband, just one of the sidebands.
And it took up less space, and it was more intelligible over a greater distance, and it was a pretty neat way to go.
Trouble with it was that it sounded kind of like Donald Duck.
Made everybody kind of sound like Donald Duck in the demo I did a little while ago, right?
And now we have this new thing called ESSB.
It's an experimenter's dream.
And for the first time, I mean, it's very exciting.
It's incredibly exciting.
For the first time, sideband, instead of sounding like Donald Duck, really can sound very good at a very tiny larger amount of bandwidth, or space, if you will.
When I say the word bandwidth, you can think of it as space, just like bandwidth.
You know, you've got bandwidth on the internet.
The more bandwidth you have, the faster you go, right?
Well, it's the same with radio spectrum.
You can think of it as space or bandwidth.
And so with just a very tiny amount of extra bandwidth, or in some cases, no extra at all, you can sound good, really good, on sideband.
It's reminiscent, frankly, of the old AM amplitude modulated days.
And nobody wants to see it get stifled.
And that's what this is kind of all about.
The American Radio Relay League has a proposal that is, I believe, misguided and would stifle this experimentation.
And what method of propulsion is it using, Praytale?
unidentified
It's a hybrid electric with fuel, alternating and rechargeable, but does not need refueling between here and Washington, D.C. We have so got to get onto this, folks, and quickly, too.
As I mentioned a little while ago, we don't need an XPRIZE.
Because whoever invents the more efficient way is going to get their own reward, billions of dollars, no doubt.
Somebody discovering essentially free energy is going to be an instant billionaire.
So we don't really need an XPRIZE, but we do need to get going.
If our government, in my opinion, is responsible for anything at all, they're responsible for our safety and welfare, right?
And our safety and welfare, in fact, our whole existence, is based on the state of our economy.
And if we run out of energy, the state of our economy is going to be very bad.
And it's now past time, meaning peak oil and beyond, when we should be devoting almost a Manhattan-like project toward alternative energy, towards something new.
If we don't get it, there's going to be a period of great darkness descending on the country.
One last time, because I'm getting so many requests on the past last.
This ESSP that I've been talking about in the first hour.
If you want to know more about it, go to a website called NU9N.
That's the letters N U9N.
That's in Nancy.
NancyUnited9Nancy.com.com.
So it's easy.
NU9N.com.
And go up there to the MP3 area.
It's a pull-down menu, and you can listen to what some of that stuff sounds like.
It's incredible.
Absolutely incredible.
All right, coming up in a moment.
Peter Cochran was head of British Telecom Research.
This will fit right in from 1993 to 99.
Then, in 1999, he was appointed chief technologist.
In November of 2000, Peter retired from British Telecom to join his own startup company called Concept Labs, which he founded with a group of people from Apple Computers in 1998.
Peter is a graduate of Trent Polytechnic and Essex University and was the Collier Chair for the Public Understanding of Science and Technology at the University of Bristol from 1999 to 2000.
Peter is a fellow of the IEEE IEEE Royal Academy of Engineering and a member of the New York Academy of Sciences.
He has lectured widely on technology and the implications of it and was awarded an OBE, that's not out of body in this case, an OBE in 1999 for his contribution to international communications, the IEEE Millennium Medal in 2000, and the City and Guides Prince Philip Medal in 2001.
fellow knows a lot about technology, and that's what we'll talk about in a moment.
The End And indeed, for this interview, we go all the way across this land, then across the Atlantic to Peter Cochrane in Great Britain.
When you go and purchase anything today, it has a barcode.
If you have a passport, it has a barcode.
Most ID cards have a barcode.
All of those barcodes are going to be replaced by little radio transmitter receiver units that allow the item you purchase, the passport you carry, the ID card that you're wearing to be addressed.
And that is, remotely, you will be pinged.
When you go to the cash out, the electronic point of sale, instead of having to have that barcode scanner, a little radio unit will say, ah, you've just bought a shirt, a T-shirt, a pair of jeans, or whatever.
It will be logged, and you will be charged.
Ultimately, that money may well be taken directly out of your mobile phone or out of your electronic wallet or directly from your bank account.
We can now print these things, believe it or not, using ink.
We have inks that allow us to produce electronic circuits in the crudest sense, and in the most sophisticated sense, those circuits look pretty much like the chip that you very often now get on credit cards.
And they are so small and flexible that they can be just put into the collar.
There are devices that can transmit all the time, or at will, but they tend to be used for things like the seagoing containers and rather large items.
The things that you and I purchase in the stores are totally passive, but what you do is you energize them with a radio beam, and then they ping back a message to you.
We already have an awful lot of people, and I mean millions of people on this planet now, that have got embedded electronics, which includes artificial respiratory stimulators, artificial hearts, all kinds of pain relief modules.
Some of these have to be addressed anyway electronically to be tuned.
So if you have a pacemaker, for example, it has to be set up for your body, so to hit some reasonable medium whereby it can cope with you jogging or walking fast or doing a bit of manual labor.
You no longer have the sophistication of a real heart.
So you can imagine that you are now starting to get the opportunity to place all kinds of chips in people.
It's not widely known, but I think people would be able to imagine that show-see diplomats and people who are really worried about things like abduction can have small transponders fitted so that it's relatively easy to locate and find them.
How would this device let's draw a direct analogy?
Right now in the United States, if you've got a very expensive vehicle, for $350 you can have a small device fitted and secreted in that car whereby the police can ping the car and they can find it and therefore avoid it being dismantled and taken abroad.
Because when it is on, it does communicate with the base stations because the system has to know where you are so that you can receive calls at all times.
And so it depends on the sophistication of the system.
You can tell where someone is within a few tens of meters or ten kilometers.
If you're inside a building and you can't see the GPS satellite system, then it would give the last known location, which would be on the entry of the building, of course.
Yes, I think there are some regimes on this planet that you would be very worried about them knowing absolutely everything about you.
The reality is none of us have had any privacy or secrecy for a long time.
If you're determined to do so, you can always find out where someone is.
You can always find out a lot of data about them.
This raises the specter of knowing that you and I buy the same running shoes in combination with the same shorts and T-shirts and things like that.
That could be useful marketing information.
But, you know, hey, that kind of information is actually available today.
You have loyalty programs, you have credit cards, and you have electronic tills.
The difference being, you could imagine having an RFID scanner in your mobile phone and being able to sit at a table next to someone and think, hmm, I like those shoes.
I wonder what they are.
And you could scan them and you can get details of those shoes.
So where this seems to be going is in the direction of breakable RFID transponders.
That is, when you purchase the goods, either the chips are ticked off because they're on a tag with a piece of string or they're glued on and you rip them off.
Or you snap them and that breaks them.
But if you look at this on several dimensions, when companies in the United States have manufactured, shall we say, trainers or clothing or anything else, when a million are shipped from South America into the U.S. or from Southeast Asia into the U.S., there's a thing called shrinkage.
And a large number of items disappear out of those orders.
The U.S. government in particular are going to, at some point in the near future, lay down a minimum standard for all containers entering the United States.
And I'm talking about these 20-foot standard ship-going containers that you see on the back of trucks and you see them stacked at the dockside.
Now, what you really want to know is who shipped this box?
In transit, How did it arrive in the United States?
By what route?
Were the doors opened?
Was it tampered with?
Was there anything extra put in?
Was there anything extra taken out?
Is there anything in there that is making a noise?
Exhibiting peculiar chemical behaviors?
Does it contain nasty substances or anything else?
So you then have a very interesting situation that you've got the entire history of the container to hand, and the container will have the ability to communicate with the goods inside.
So if someone is able to break open the container, you will be able to identify when it was and what was removed and which items.
At the moment, if a couple of thousand shirts or a couple of thousand trainers are removed from a container, you don't know when it was opened, where it was opened, who has taken them and where those trainers have gone.
Now, you will be able to say exactly where those trainers were removed or those shirts were removed.
Now, when they appear on the black market, most likely they'll come onto the black market and they will either enter stores or they will enter the supply chain somehow.
Then you've got the possibility of being able to detect them being sold at an electronic point of sale or the people in the UK, like the customs and exercise or the Coast Guard in the US or whoever would be able to scan those items and say, aha, they've been stolen.
We know where they were stolen from, what shipment.
And you can then close down on the people responsible for that shrinkage.
The thing that people worry about is losing their privacy and their security, or indeed being tracked.
I mean, there are opposite of the coin, and that is if the technology is not sufficiently thought through, if it's not sufficiently well engineered, if it's not controlled, then of course the bad guys could get an RFID reader and use it to identify Art Bell in the crowd, and that you might worry about.
Well, I might so why shouldn't I be worried about that?
Why isn't that a big hole in all of this?
That it might be used for the bad guys, or for that matter, the bad guys might figure a way to mislead the authorities about where those shirts got lifted from that container by changing the information.
We all know.
I mean, you know, we've got the people writing the nasty worms and viruses for computers, and we've got people fighting it.
It's a war going on.
The war would be involved in that kind of thing, too, wouldn't it?
So I understand that, but I think Peter, look, if we give these things up in favour of security, then in some ways the bad guys have achieved their goal.
The British population in general, to my great surprise, don't seem to take any notice, don't bother.
No one's worried.
The American population, on the other hand, are kind of alarmed by this big brother view.
But it has had a phenomenal effect on clamping down on petty crime, shoplifting and violent crimes in the UK.
The sort of thing that people really object to over here are things like speed cameras on the freeways, which start off as being a safety feature of the road system and then rapidly turn into being a money-making enterprise where finding drivers for going over the speed limit seems to become some kind of sport, which is, I think, very detrimental to the whole scheme.
There are people who in the UK are paying for the information of where their children are from their mobile phone.
You have to imagine a population in the UK that is only 60 million people on a piece of land that is smaller than Texas where 90 million mobile phones have been sold and 45 million mobile phones are operational every day.
So you have most children above the age of five have got a mobile phone and now we have the parents of teenagers in particular are now looking to track their children actively so that they know that they've gone on the same route every day to school, they've not deviated from the route, they are in school or in the evening they have gone to the friends and what have you.
This is a function of the, if you like, the occasional abduction or crime against a young person and it gets heightened by society and people get anxious and now you have a service being offered where you can pay to have your loved ones tracked.
So there's another extreme view, if you like, where people have the choice.
There is another element to this in the UK, and that is, shall we say, middle-aged sons and daughters who are worried about their older parents who may go out and get lost or be ill or have an accident who can now be located, who can be found, who can be monitored, so that you know that they're not in some kind of trouble.
So we now have houses being equipped with monitoring devices that says every morning between 7 and 7.30, this old lady who lives on her own opens the refrigerator door, she switches on the kettle, and she switches on the TV or the radio.
So if she departs from that routine significantly, someone gives a call or pops around to see her to make sure that she's alive and well.
it sounds good the downside to it being I think individual worries it My personal view is I am very happy for my children and for my wife to be on camera when they go into town at night so that I know that they are under observation and that they are well and not at any kind of risk.
Well, right now I'm at a delightful place called Colleton, which is in Devon.
If you think of the UK, you'd have to go south to the coast From London and then head out west from London, that is towards the United States by about 150 miles.
It's on the leg that's starting to head out towards Land's End.
So it's a bright, beautiful day, and I'm in sailing country here.
For any of your listeners who get to the UK and they walk down Oxford Street in London for the entire length of Oxford Street, you're always on camera.
In the same way that the zero-tolerance programs on crime in the cities in the United States has pushed the criminals out of the cities and they're now moving out into the suburbs, guess what happens with the cameras?
It tends to displace crime from one place to another.
The only upside to that is that it displaces it to a place where the opportunity for crime is actually reduced.
So instead of all the shoplifting and car stealing and high value items from the high street, it tends to push the problem someplace else.
Would I object if in American cities, if virtually everywhere there were cameras, and personally...
Really, I wouldn't.
Peter, I don't think that I would object.
I know that they're already working on sophisticated facial recognition programs that a computer will be attached to the camera, and it will look for people who are wanted for crimes and that sort of thing, and alarms go off and buzzers sound when that person is found.
Now, I guess the only thing I would want to be sure of is that the technology is sound, that it wouldn't be IDing me as somebody who just did something awful when it ought not.
I think it is possible to do all of this, and it all works.
But at the end of the day, you finish up with human beings at the end of the decision-making chain who may decide that you are the criminal and they pull a gun on you, or in the United States.
In the UK, of course, they'll just say, excuse me, sir, can I just have a word with you?
So it's a little different.
Once someone's pulled a gun, the prospect of serious damage has just gone up.
If it's a manual intervention, then it's slightly different.
So I think all of this is about relative risk.
If you look at the airport incidents, if you look at the things like the shooting crimes, terrorist incidents, a lot of the time society knows who these people are, but has failed to spot them as they come into the country.
And I always look at my passport and feel that the photograph in my passport is of someone else.
It definitely doesn't look like me.
It's a very poor representation of me.
And yet, a very simple thing to do, and indeed I travel into the United States a lot.
And for those people who are listening who do not travel in and out of the United States, you now have your fingerprints taken, and your face is recorded by camera as you go into the United States.
There is just an electronic pad, almost like a little liquid crystal display.
You put your forefinger on and roll it.
You take the forefinger of your other hand and you roll it.
You stand in front of the camera.
The agent just lines up the camera, presses click, and you are in the record.
They've already scanned your passport, so your passport is on record, and now you've got a photograph and a fingerprint associated with your passport.
So the next time you come in, that system is used to recognise you.
My only complaint about the system is I still have to wait in line to get into the U.S. I would just like a system that said, all right, Peter Cochrane, he's here again, he's on business, he's not been a terrorist for the last hundred times he came into the U.S., he's not a terrorist today, let's just let him in.
That would be my idea of hatting when I'm traveling.
Now, maybe you could tell me what technology we could use to equally secure our southern border, about 2,000-plus miles of border with Mexico that is like a sieve.
In other words, it's nice that we can know that Peter Cochrane's a good or a bad guy as he comes into the country with a passport, but what if Peter just wades through the water and jumps the fence?
Actually, a number of devices sort of update us on what the latest is on some of these things.
And the first thing I want to ask you about is cell phones.
Now, as a radio talk host, Peter, I many times take just random calls from the audience, open lines.
And I would say it's getting to the point where about 50% of those calling are calling on cell phones.
Now, it's not the fault of the user, Peter.
However, we've gone from analog phones, which sounded, frankly, pretty good, and we've taken this giant leap forward, which actually is a giant leap in reverse.
And I've got to be honest with you, Peter, most cell phones these days sound like dog poop.
It's not a fundamentally technology-based problem.
It is all a question of choice.
I have to say that to my great surprise, the U.S. seems to be the most cost-conscious country I've been to almost anywhere with regard to mobile phones.
The emphasis is on how much is it going to cost me, not what kind of quality I'm going to get.
So if we look at the U.S. network and the U.K. network, for example, a mobile operator in the United Kingdom, which is less than half the size of Texas, will install just over 30,000 cell sites.
Okay, 30,000 cell sites.
In the United States, for the whole of the United States, they install 22,000 or thereabouts.
So instead of having mobile phone cells that are of the order 1 to 15 kilometers max, that's sort of, shall we say, half a mile to 10 miles across.
In the United States, you get cells that are 40 miles across.
And so the signal becomes much more variable.
And if you're in an automobile or indeed walking, you find a lot of blank spots where the signal disappears.
But even when someone's close to a cell site, in many cases, the digital signal is so poor, Peter, that it just I can't understand why people put up with it and why there is not more of a scream for better quality.
If any of your listeners have used voice over IP, that's voice over internet protocol, and there are a lot of companies out there that are providing that service.
The one thing that you notice is that the quality of the connection in terms of the speaker, when the connection is established, it's like talking to someone on the radio, on the FM radio, or on a hi-fi circuit where you've got lots of bandwidth.
And I always say of my own industry, you know, the one thing that the telecommunications industry have still not figured out, that Hollywood figured out straight off the bat, and that is the emotional bits are the most important bits.
And what happens is in Hollywood, they go to an awful lot of trouble to give you the full voice, the full music, the whole nine yards of the fidelity so that it's a really good experience.
In telecommunications, they throw away that fidelity.
It is most of these wondrous new things that we're going to talk about, the conveniences of modern life, mobile phones, cameras, cam recorders, PDAs, MPEG-3 players, laptops, that sort of thing.
They're coming more and more, and there's really not a whole lot we can do about it.
Some of us enjoy the technology.
Some of us fear the technology.
And I guess that's what it's all about.
Peter Cochran is here talking about all of this.
We'll get right back to him.
It's really quite remarkable, that is to say, what I was talking with all of you about in the first hour, bandwidth, such an issue in this modern day and age, and how it related to ham radio.
Now, how it relates to cell phones.
You see, the way it works, folks, is this.
With a very skinny little bandwidth, with just a very little bit of room in which to send your signal, you have a sort of a, well, a squeezed together, a poor-sounding result.
And if the American people would kind of get together and say, look, we want quality.
We demand quality.
After all, it's a market driven by what people want, right?
And if they're sick of the way cell phones sound, then they can go to their cell phone companies and say, you know what?
Your cell phone sounds like a choice of words there.
And you would like better quality.
And if more people did that, then by golly, we'd get a little more bandwidth or a better digital encoding method, and pretty soon it would sound like the good old days.
I've got a question about cell phones while we're at it from Miller in San Diego who says, Art, my cell phone has a camera on it that can take pictures.
And I was wondering if Peter would comment on whether somebody could be viewing me using my own camera remotely and viewing me.
And if they could, do I have a right to know about that?
As far as I'm aware, the only way anyone could do that would be to get your mobile phone off you and modify it without your knowledge.
And certainly you have a right to know about it if they did.
I'm not aware of any way of actually doing that right now without some kind of intervention in the phone.
That's not to say that it can't be done.
I'm just not aware of it.
I guess the sort of thing you have to watch out for in the future is that these devils, literally, who do the viruses and infect our computers are now starting to attack mobile phones because mobile phones have an operating system and they're starting to look more like computers than mobile phones.
So in principle, there's no reason someone wouldn't be able to infect your mobile phone through a download and then perhaps some kind of control over it at some point in the future.
I mean, after all, if the mobile phone is connected to the Internet, which it is, and has the capacity to take photographs, which it does, then heavens knows, you might even be able to stream, which means they could watch a virtual motion picture of where you're going and what you're doing.
It's kind of interesting that the clamshell phone and the chocolate bar that's used in Europe are now arriving with two cameras, one pointing to the user and one pointing to the outside world.
And a lot of automobiles now that you buy at the top end in Europe, certainly, and coming out of Japan, there are several cameras in the cars for spotting people who shouldn't be in the car recording their actions so you can film the thieves.
Systems are being worked on where you have cameras at six points in your car.
There's a sideward-looking camera on each side.
There's a forward and backward-looking camera.
And then there's a camera on each corner of the car looking outwards.
And we're heading towards the black box, the flight recorder, black box in the automobile that records the last 15 minutes of a journey and the next 15 minutes after the accident.
So if you like, the half an hour that is bridging some traffic incident, your driving is recorded.
The actual incident of the accident itself is recorded.
And then what ensues immediately after the accident is recorded.
So I think that it's not just in buildings and it's not just for pedestrians, but for drivers, in every aspect of life, these cameras are starting to arrive and will be deployed.
And the reason is they don't cost thousands of dollars anymore.
Also, there are systems being developed that will allow the police on a chase or on trying to apprehend a driver being able to look at the number plate, go onto a database, call up that car on a network and disable that car progressively and bring it to a halt.
I always think now in terms of driving, for the listeners' benefits, let me reveal that I'm in my 59th year.
I've been driving in the UK since I was 17.
I've been driving in the United States for the last 30 years.
And I've always felt relatively relaxed about driving.
You know, I try not to break the law.
I try to be a reasonable driver.
But increasingly, I'm finding it difficult to drive, I think, within the law in that as more and more cars, more and more automobiles have been put on the roads, especially in Europe and the UK, and it's become more and more crowded.
There's more and more signage on the roads.
There's more cameras.
There's more restrictions.
There's more controls.
And I am personally finding that it's getting increasingly difficult to drive within the letter of the law.
The new drivers that are coming along, the new young people who are 17, who are coming along, that is the norm.
That is where they start.
So there are a lot of things that are analogous to that, where you say, well, when I was born, there were no cameras.
Am I worried about cameras?
For the young people, they've never known a life without the camera, so what's the big deal?
The big deal is that Yes.
You and I know what the big deal is, but the question never actually props in their mind, I don't think.
I think at this point I should point out that there are now two worlds.
There's North America and there's the rest of the world.
North America, 4% of the population of the planet.
4%.
North America is besotted by two technologies, the personal computer, email, and the PDA, the Blackberry kind of device that allows you to do your email on the move and has your diary with you and all of that kind of thing.
The rest of the world is absolutely besotted by the mobile phone and text.
You will not find many people with a PDA in Europe compared to the United States.
I think it's the speed at which the mobile phone got out into the environment in the rest of the world and the mobile phone got a foothold.
It took over.
The United States has been slow with mobile phones, but then the PDA has arrived.
The PDA has arrived in Europe and the rest of the world at a time when the mobile phone is dominant and text is actually dominant mode of communication.
I use a combination of a mobile phone and a laptop computer.
I don't have a PDA because it doesn't do the job for me.
Now, it depends on your business.
If I could run my business with a pencil and a piece of paper, I wouldn't touch technology.
Believe me, I'd use the absolute minimum.
But it turns out, for what I do, that a laptop computer is essential and a mobile phone is, but a PDA isn't.
It doesn't do it for me.
So I am very much a believer in appropriate technology.
What is it that does it for you?
Then just use it.
But I don't like using technology for technology's sake.
Where we're actually headed is what I call the Swiss Army knife solution.
You know, we're going to finish up with a mobile phone, that's a PDA, that's a camera, that's a movie camera, that's a mobile music station, it's an MP3 or an iPod, if you like, all in the one box.
My fear is, exactly like the Swiss Army knife, it'll do absolutely everything really badly.
And what intrigues me is, what's the end point going to be?
Will we really give up our good quality camera for a camera that's not quite so good in the mobile phone?
Will we give up our iPod for an MP3 or on our mobile phone?
I mean, let me tell you that no engineer, no scientist, no marketeer or manager in the telecommunications industry could have guessed how much people would be prepared for pay for so little and such poor service as they do with a mobile phone.
After 100 years of worrying about the quality of connection and the clarity of connection, all of that was abandoned at the shake of a stick for the mobile phone because what people really value is the mobility.
And you see it everywhere.
If they're in an office, there will be a telephone on the desk and they've got their mobile phone on their hip.
They will reach for the mobile phone always.
They never pick up the phone in the office.
The mobile phone call is more expensive.
It's poorer quality, but they will use it because it's more convenient.
There's a couple of reports out now that say quite, and it's causing quite a stir over here that actually people who use computers and mobile phones a lot are actually smarter than people who read books.
I have to say, when I work with and collaborate with young people, they're extremely sharp.
They think quite quickly.
They've got this mind-eye-thumb agility for texting on mobile phones.
On computer games, they tend to think not two-dimensionally, but three-dimensionally.
They've got a tremendous spatial awareness that I don't possess.
So they come at things differently.
I would say that perhaps on the downside, they're very, very active.
They tend to resort to the keyboard instead of resorting to thinking sometimes.
But as I look back in history, we've had to abandon, shall we say, sacred ground of education time and time and again as the technology has progressed.
And I now find it very, very difficult to say, well, this is right and this is wrong.
I don't think that's applicable.
But just a couple of weeks ago, I was judging a competition here of 16 to 18-year-old school students who'd done engineering projects.
And all of them were super projects.
The teams were excellent.
And what really amused me was that despite the fact that the students were taking advanced math and physics, in their projects there was absolutely no quantification at all.
It was all flying by the seat of the pants engineering.
They'd built all kinds of things by trial and error, but had done no analysis whatsoever.
Whereas, if you like, an experienced engineer or scientist would sit down and think, they would do some calculations and some estimates, and then they'd build something.
And these young people had done exactly the reverse.
And I thought, well, this is kind of interesting because this is the computer games kind of mentality.
You know, you don't sit down and analyze, you react.
I think it makes you think metaphorically on your seat.
You have to be really responsive.
You have to be intuitive.
And I happen to think that this is where it wins.
In games where strategic thinking is required, where you have to allocate resource, where you have to make commitment really, really quickly on the basis of scant or no information.
And so what we're really talking here about is almost the virtual warfare kind of situation.
It turns out that the kids are really, really good at that.
And that is where they score.
Which, funnily enough, kind of mirrors the modern business environment.
Because believe you me, in business at the moment, we seem to be at war every day.
It's a very, very fast, responsive, reactive kind of place.
And there's very, very little time given to, if you like, rational thought, reasoning, or deep consideration.
It's usually reaction.
And that's where they seem to score.
They are really, really fast at looking at a situation that's very complex and making a good value judgment.
They don't get it right all the time, but on average they get it right better than most.
It is with RFIDs on the products you buy, to tracking on the cell phone you use and cameras in your face as you walk down or drive down the streets, to all of this and all this technology we have today in the world.
Can you opt out of it?
Or is it here and you have no choice whatsoever?
And how do you feel about it?
In a moment, we'll be taking questions for Peter Cochran.
I'm allowing some of you to supply a little of your own input and questions.
So pick one of those numbers and line up and I'll put you together with the man on the other side of the Atlantic.
Doug in Colorado Springs asks a pretty good question of Peter, and it is, I guess my question is, does playing computer games actually make you smarter, or do smarter people tend to play more computer games?
They just tend to prove that you're good at doing IQ tests.
A lot of people who are very, very high intelligence, quotient IQ, don't seem to do well in other spheres and vice versa.
It's an interesting observation.
I look at the society I live in and I look in the United States and I certainly see young people who don't mesh well with technology and don't get on well with computers and indeed tend to avoid using them.
They do other things.
However, I would say that the majority use the computers freely, without thought, without any worry about getting into a problem area and they have them as a tool.
Personally, Peter, I don't see how I could live in my world.
In fact, I could not live in my world without them.
Correct.
I use them to control all kinds of things.
And I say that.
I control.
Not controlling me, but I control them.
Now, Pat in Phoenix, Arizona asks a relevant question.
Art, pressing an 800 megahertz cell phone transmitter, identical to a microwave oven in some ways, as you know, up against your ear may fry some precious brain cells, but will not raise one's IQ.
Well, I've yet to see any very definite evidence that there is a problem with a mobile phone and cooking the brain, and I have this problem.
The same listeners who worry about cooking their brain with a mobile phone most likely use a cordless phone in their home, and they don't worry about that.
And the power coming out of the cordless phone is 10 times greater.
They will stand in front of their microwave oven with a power output that is 10,000 times greater and look through the mesh to see if their food is cooked.
And they never check if the door leaks.
If the door is not a good fit, microwave radiation gets out.
They will hold up a camcorder to the eye.
They will wear a walkman or some other electronic device on the hip.
All of these things emit radiation of one kind or another.
Certainly, the microwave oven will do you a lot of damage if you were to do something silly like take the door off and stick your hands in and that kind of thing.
So it's a relative risk.
I look at it like this.
If there was a problem with a mobile phone, you would have thought that it would have shown up now because people have been using mobile transmitters in the police and in the military of much greater power.
And we're talking a mobile phone at a maximum of half a watt compared to a military manpack radio or a police radio at something like 10 to 100 times more power.
And we've had no incidences of people being cooked.
With the mass usage of mobile phones, we really ought to be seeing a problem if there was one.
We've got now a history of using mobile radio devices that goes way back before World War II and certainly after World War II.
It's been a very intense and rapid growth of mobile devices.
So it's about 50 years, almost a generation's worth of experience with no certain proof that we have got a problem.
If you look at the incidence of lives saved by having mobile wireless technology, it is vast, either through police and emergency services or through private individuals now with mobile phones.
People's lives are saved every day with mobile phones.
Well, Peter, suppose somebody like that doesn't want to be tracked, doesn't want to buy items with RFID tags, doesn't want to be tracked and photographed and all the rest of it.
There is no way that you can get a mobile phone and the mobile phone company not know where you are.
I think if you're a good citizen, you've not got a problem because it's equivalent to a wiretap.
At the present time, to get the information on someone's location, it's equivalent to the old wiretap.
The police and security services have to actually make an application to get the data on where you are from the mobile phone companies.
The mobile phone companies, per se, only use the data from a control point of view so that they can contact you when someone is calling you.
They need to know where you are in their network to be able to connect you to a caller.
So I think that there is that security.
Now, in the RFID space, it's only being deployed right now in trials.
There are millions of these tags being tried in Europe right now.
And really, they're on high-value items Like suits of clothing that are like $200 or $300 or entertainment items, that kind of thing.
And the tags are taken off, but the tags could be embedded, the tags could be left in.
So I would not be at all surprised that you and I will have the opportunity to purchase RFID sniffers and we'll be able to find the tags and break them if that is the case.
It looks like a lot of the mobile phone companies, the phone makers are going to put them into their mobile phones so that you can actually use them in the stores and the supermarkets.
One, to check out the goods that you're looking at, and two, even locate the goods that you're looking for.
Imagine going up to a rack of clothing that's got men's pants on and you say, well, actually, I'm a 36-waist 29-inch leg guy.
Is there a pair of pants on this rack of that size?
And you hold up your mobile phone and it says, no.
East of the Rockies, you're on the air with Peter Cochran.
Hi.
Hello Hello.
unidentified
Yes, sir.
There was a young man, he was 10 years old, California, that got third-degree burns on his leg in his growing area from a cell phone exploding in his pocket.
Yeah, you're walking around with a hand grenade on your hip, more or less.
I mean, these things have got an awful lot of power.
It's a very, very rare occurrence.
I can't think of an incidence reported in the UK press, but I know there have been one or two incidences worldwide where this has happened.
I'm not at all sure what fault has caused this to occur, but I do know that the mobile phone industry do have a test they call the rapid disassembly test, which is where they effectively drive a nail through the battery and they have a look at the explosive force.
But what you've got is an awful lot of energy in a very, very compact space.
But as I understand it, the really worrisome ones have been where people have actually had the mobile phone in their pocket or that's a real worry.
I mean, God forbid which pocket you've got it in, but you can imagine that if it's in the pants pocket, hopefully they've got it in the back, not the front.
If it's in a jacket, I get the idea.
Yeah, in the breast pocket, the implications are really quite profound and very, very worrying.
But when you look at the millions and millions of mobile phones that are manufactured, it's a very, very small number.
Yeah, or certainly if you try and cross the road, I mean, the chance of being killed crossing the road in the UK is only about one in 6,000.
So every time you cross the road, there's a 1 in 6,000 chance you're going to get hit, which is a very, very high odds.
So the odds of a mobile phone hurting you are very, very small.
But that's not to say we shouldn't try and fix whatever problem that there is there with that.
But I don't know the details of the individual cases, and I don't know how many cases there have been, but I've certainly heard about it in the U.S. Any idea why the frogs there in Great Britain have been exploding?
Okay, then I cannot believe that the Congress of the United States passed the law that high-definition TV was going to have to come in and nothing else after 2006.
And the possibility that the government, as George Orwell said, was going to have a chip in there that would be able to intrude and record anything being said or done in the household.
With regard to high-definition TV, Peter, there is something about in the next few years, I'm not quite sure they may have put off the date, but they're essentially going to turn off regular television in favor of digital television, or high-definition, if you will.
And that change is due to occur here in the States, I think, pretty soon.
We've got the same rush in the U.K. They want to do the same thing here.
People are gradually being levered into buying extra boxes or new TV sets to get digital as quickly as possible.
And one of the reasons is there's a hell of a rush for the fixed spectrum that's been allocated to television, which is ideal for use for other mobile applications.
And so there's almost a gold rush for the spectrum, and they want to move TV out of the way and put it someplace else so that they can get at the spectrum for mobile applications.
That's one of the things that are one of the driving forces and it seems to be fairly universal.
One of the the big problem is there's been a bit of an arm wrestling contest about the international standards for high definition T V. The Europeans, the Americans and Southeast Asia seem to want to go three separate directions and it would be rather nice if for a change we had one standard for high definition T V everywhere.
You know what actually happens is these rather large international companies that we have that manufacture all the boxes have just invested a whole lot of money in R and D to develop their version of high definition TV and they want their version to be the international standard and so you've got these forces all vying for different standards.
I can't, to be blunt, I can't tell any difference when I look at the pictures.
There are some technical differences.
I don't think it makes a whole lot of difference.
It's kind of interesting, as I look back in history, people say, hey, you know, the trains in the United States, they run on the same tracks as the trains that run in India and China and in the U.K. Wow, we got the standard right.
Well, the reason was, if you go back just over a couple of hundred years, there was only one nation in the world making anything, and that was the U.K. So we sold all the railways to China and India and Russia and America, and the world got the same standard for railways all over the world, and it stuck.
So everywhere you go, all the railways are the same gauge.
Brilliant.
Well, unfortunately, fortunately, it's got a little more complicated.
You come up to the radio era, and you find that pretty much the standards are the same because of, one, Marconi, and the early developments of radio spreading, and we got more or less a uniform standard.
Then you get the intervention of a period coming up to World War II where an electronics industry started to blossom in the United States.
It was really starting to blossom in Europe.
And so you got two or three or four standards for television, and the U.S. was fast off the mark.
they came up with the NTSC system which the Europeans euphemistically call never twice the same colour because that's a little bit of an elbow dig because the system depends on the amplitude of the signal and in the United States you you see colour variation with the signal amplitude changing.
In Europe they went for a different system which was PAL, phase alternate line, which is based on not the amplitude but the phase of the signal, if you like, the time or cycle position of the signal.
And therefore you don't get this variation anymore.
The reason is that the scan rate in Europe is 50 hertz.
This is another interesting standard story.
And in the United States, it's 100 hertz.
That is the wave generating, bringing the power to you, the rotation of the machinery down in the generation center, the power station, if you will.
In the United States, it's going faster by 10 cycles, if you like, compared to Europe.
And that was, again, about market protection.
Europe went principally for 220 volts, 50 hertz.
The United States went for 110 volts, 60 hertz.
And immediately you can protect your market because goods in Europe won't go to the US and vice versa.
You can't explore.
And those kinds of things give subtle differences.
And so what has happened in Europe is that they've doubled the scan to 100 hertz, if you like the same harmonic, of the 50, and therefore you get rid of the flicker.
But you're absolutely right.
These are really sort of just subtle changes.
And of course, when you go onto the internet, what do you get?
You don't get 50 frames, you get 35 or 25 or something, and it's really bad.
Indeed so, I mean, just to be able to say that from coast to coast and worldwide on the internet tells you where we are in our world.
Peter Cochran's book, Uncommon Sense in the back says, Uncommon Sense.
It's a series of remarkable insights into work, communication, family, communities, and just about everything else touched or yet to be touched by the world of technology.
It'll help you live in an increasingly digital world, which continues to move at an accelerating pace.
Make sense of the what and why of events created by the chaos of rapid and universal communication.
Use inverted out-of-the-box thinking to see solutions and find value in life and business that previously seemed impossible.
Again, the name of the book is Un Common Sense by Peter Cochran.
and we'll get right back to him.
Well, we do live in a very different world from a technological point of view.
There's no question about it.
I personally love it, as you might imagine.
I'm as into it as one might be, probably too into it.
Barbara in Chrisfield, Maryland, says, hey, Art, what about some kind of cloaking device to prevent tracking?
That technology may be behind all the testing the public does on all the other technology for those behind it all.
So in other words, she's saying, isn't there some device made that can even if you don't want to be part of this new digital world, Peter, that could cloak you from it, protect you from all of this?
Anytime you go into a supermarket and you use your club card to get that discount, it's being done with the barcode in combination with your card.
As far as using RFID in the retail commercial world, the advantage to the retailer is, when example, using a smart shelf, they will not be able to tell which person is pulling things off of the shelf.
They want to know information such as how many times is a product being taken off the shelf looked at and put on before it is purchased?
How long is a product sitting on the shelf before it is purchased?
That will allow them to decide, should I continue to carry that product lined?
I mean, you see its advantages and no downside, basically, right?
unidentified
Depending on whose hands RFID gets into, there could be disadvantages.
However, in my experience, I have only seen the retailers, the distributors, et cetera, looking for a financial advantage in the use of RFID rather than the invasion of privacy.
I mean, the terse response is you've never had any privacy or secrecy.
Get over it.
I mean, the core is absolutely right.
All the information is known.
However, there are some subtleties.
Commercial world never does anything unless there's some cost advantage.
One of the biggest trials in the UK has been run by Tesco, which is, if you like, the Walmart of the UK.
And it's been used for shelf-fill monitoring, which lines up exactly with your caller.
Instead of having high-value items like DVDs disappearing off the shelf so nobody can see it and buy it, it's used to monitor shelf-fill, and therefore the shelves are always full of the DVDs that are selling well and you maximize sales.
That's one example.
The other one is for the control of shoplifters and the stealing of goods.
So high-value things, funnily enough like razor blades, have got RFID tags in to try and prevent the theft.
There's a kind of thing that easily slips into the pocket and people could walk out with.
I mean, the ultimate will be that they'll know it's you that's bought it, and they'll know that you bought half the items, but you've also stolen a few.
It's going to make it impossible to get through without getting spotted, that's for sure.
And I'd like to share a concern with the guest and see if they've already been there in the U.K. And that has to do with a situation we have sometimes in America where private information gathered through various means ends up in places that the citizen wouldn't prefer.
Either because, for instance, a phone company sells for a price a person's bill or records, or recently there was a hack where there were many, many thousands of records released to the wrong place.
And that combines with the potential for these records to remain for decades, is that something that has already been, either has already happened or have they set in consumer safeguards to prevent that sort of thing?
Let's start with the selling of information, Peter.
The caller is dead right about that.
That's very annoying.
In other words, your information is so free-flowing, and that's all fine and well, except that there are companies that are selling information to other companies that, because you bought item A, probably would be interested in item B. So you get bombarded with spam or spam mail or, you know, just otherwise bothered.
And I sit here privately sort of worrying about getting spam voice over IP messages because now if you're using voice over IP, the phone call doesn't cost anything.
And we're all subject to that.
What I think is really worrying is when large institutions like banks or indeed phone companies get a security flaw where people get whole rafts of customer data stolen and then it is used for various unlawful, one way or another, purposes.
And that really is worrying.
But according to regulation and the law, certainly in Europe, all that sort of stuff ought not to be able to happen, but actually it does.
There's a commercial running in this country right now, and I need not name the company, but basically it shows some real pretty gal talking to her sister in Spain.
And the husband's on the way out, and he says, hey, who are you talking to, honey?
Oh, I'm talking to my sister in Spain, and I've been on the phone since 6 this morning.
And he just smiles.
No, he doesn't smile.
He kind of looks at her like, what?
Are you crazy?
And she says, no problem.
I'm using so-and-so company.
Voice over IP.
I can talk for hours and hours.
Well, it's true.
She can.
And that's all neat and well, but how's the phone company going to stand up under that?
I mean, voice over IP means you're sending your voice over the internet, folks, and it's just like phone, same any kind of phone connection.
You're talking to somebody on another continent, and it doesn't matter.
You can talk for free for hours.
Well, that isn't going to work out too well for the phone company, is it, Peter?
The sad thing is that for the last nine or ten years, the phone companies knew and have known about this technology.
They've experimented with this technology.
They've been in a state of denial, almost like the music industry with MP3 downloads.
And now that technology is upon them.
Now, here's an interesting and important fact.
If you take the bandwidth or the number of circuits that we have available on the Internet and you compare it to the number of circuits that we have by the phone companies for making telephone calls, it just does not add up.
The whole of the planet cannot go on the Internet.
The Internet is not big enough.
And therefore, you finish up with voice over IP calls over the Internet proper that either work really well or they're terrible.
As you say, dog poop, they just do not work at all.
So we now have got a lot of the phone companies looking at ripping out all of those great big switches that they've got, replacing them by internet routers and switches.
The good news is that if you were to build a phone company from zero today and start with a clean sheet of paper, the cost would be much less than 10% of the cost expended by the incumbents.
That is, if you were to take the AT ⁇ T network or the Verizon network or the Bell South network and say, right, let's start with a clean sheet of paper and we'll replace the entire network with internet protocol-based, optical fiber-based, wireless-based technologies, the cost would be less than 10% of what those companies have already expended in creating that network.
So the forecast is that the telcos are going to head down towards the commodity business where their profit margins are no longer 22%, 15% or 10%.
They're going to be 1% or 2%.
And the good news for the consumer is we're going to get virtually free communication.
It's just going to fall off the end.
It's going to be in the noise of our accounting system.
So they're just going to have to learn to live with it.
All right.
So that's fine.
But now let's move into the next logical area, which is MPEG-3s.
And worse yet, downloading of movies.
Peter, I really do have, I should let you know, sympathy with the artists, the music artists and the artists, the people that make motion pictures.
It seems as though this music is being downloaded for free, and the now motion pictures are being downloaded for free many times before they've even come out of the box or to get to the box office.
I mean, it's pretty sad.
And what can be done or will be done or is being done about this?
All of their money comes out of DVD sales and CD sales.
Now a new technology arrives.
What we need is a new distribution model.
Now if you take a C D on the shelf of a store in a box with a cover on it and what have you with the music on, they were selling them at like $22, but actually they cost less than $1 to make.
And if you say how much money did the artists get versus the industry, how much did that get, it was a pretty low percentage.
So here comes a new model.
And really, it's a great shame that in the case of the American recording industry, they didn't embrace Napster and Byte and get into the download business really quick because people like Steve Jobs have actually stolen a march on them and other companies have too.
And I think that the movie industry is now facing a similar crisis.
But now there's a new model and this new model is kind of interesting.
You know when Hollywood creates a good movie, they know it's a good movie, they phase that release of that movie across the planet to heighten the attention of the audience to sell it more, to market it more, to make more money, and that is what they do.
If they make a dog of a movie, it's released on the same day all over the world so that at least in the first week or so, they can recoup their expenditure and not have a total loss on their hands.
So now what happens?
The young kids go to watch the movie, they sit in the movie house, inside the first hour they're texting all the friends, don't come and see this movie, it's a real dog.
So all of a sudden, they're starting to lose money on these movies because of this mechanism.
Now comes another mechanism, which is really interesting.
What the kids do, one of them downloads the movie, it's an illegal copy, it shouldn't be on the internet, it shouldn't be anywhere.
They get a download copy, they watch the movie before they go to the movie house, and they email or text their friends and say, hey, this movie's great, let's go tonight.
And they go to the movie house to watch it because they get the big screen, the surround sound, and that social engagement with all of their friends, and it's that evening out.
No, it's very difficult to get actual numbers, but I've been involved in a number of studies and observational sessions looking at what people do.
And I'm intrigued, the number of people that download music and then buy the CD, the number of people who download movies and then buy the DVD, because what they want is the real quality recording.
Speaking of all this technology, should you desire to communicate with me by email, you may do so ever so easily.
I am ArtBell, A-R-T, B-E-L-L at A-O-L.com or Artbell at MindSpring.com.
Either way, it'll get to me at roughly the speed of light.
That's Art Bell at AOL.com or Art Bell at MindSpring.com.
Well, like it or not, this is the world we live in.
And Peter Cochran, my guest, has described it and I guess come up with ways to help you live in it in a book called Uncommon Sense, Out of the Box Thinking for an In-the-Box World.
And that would be available at most of your local bookstores and so forth.
We were talking, and I want to finish that up.
It's so important.
You know, the movie makers, for example, when it gets to the point where these movies can be duplicated and then passed on for free in high quality, it seems to me that industry is in desperate trouble.
And America is the world's biggest movie maker.
And so what new business model do you imagine, Peter, that would be successful for them under conditions like that?
Well, I think there's more than one thing changing here.
Imagine if we could take a step forward and we got away from all this celluloid distribution.
Instead of having these films distributed in cams, they could be downloaded to the movie house.
And you could link the viewing of the movie to the selling of a DVD immediately afterwards.
Also, the selling of other goods and experiences with the movie so you got an integrated sale.
These things are going to happen to the industry and they can't stop it.
One, the technology of making movies is going to drop in cost very dramatically.
The number of people capable of making movies is going to accelerate dramatically.
The audience is going to become ever broader and, if you like, ever more pernicious in its activity to get those movies.
And it's got to see some value add.
What they're not going to be able to do is to maintain the profit margin, just like the telcos and other sectors.
They're not going to be able to maintain the old profit margins with the existing model.
So they have to change the model.
The questions are, will people, for example, download a portion of the movie or all of the movie to go on their PDA and on their laptop and will they be prepared to pay for it in the same way that people now buy ringtones?
So you have an industry now created in the last five years where people will pay money for ringtones and they will change them every month.
Will they do that with the movies?
Will they save them and will they do a similar thing?
And that no one knows.
But you know already if you go to Southeast Asia, if you go to places like Bangkok, all CDs and DVDs are a dollar.
It doesn't matter what's on them.
It can be Microsoft Office or it can be a movie or anything.
And all the C Ds and D V D's cost a dollar.
So whilst people are worrying about the internet pirating of this stuff, there's a mega industry out there of hard selling and hard pirating that's even bigger.
So I think that there's going to be a shakeout in the Industry and it's going to change.
And just recently, just roaming around the net, I found a Star Wars movie that was nothing to do with the original series, inasmuch that it wasn't made professionally.
It was made by amateurs, and it wasn't half bad.
They produced their own backdrops, their own technology scenes.
Privacy activist Bill Scannell has launched a website designed to discourage the State Department from deploying remote tagging technology and passports.
In February, the department proposed significant changes to U.S. passports that, among other things, would mandate the usage of radio frequency identification tags.
The tags would contain all the information about people on their passports as well as facial biometric information.
Privacy advocates and security experts have criticized the initiative, saying it could make Americans more insecure because the chips would broadcast the passport holders' information to potential terrorists who have scanning technology.
From identity theft to identity death, an RFID chipped U.S. passport means good news for the bad guys, Chanel wrote on a site called RFID Kills.
All of that data can be encrypted and made accessible to the right authorities only.
But at the end of the day, I have not seen a technology that has not been circumvented eventually by people who have sufficient evilness or resource to go after it.
And a lot of the time, they will use a photograph to identify you anyway.
The only mechanism I can see that could bring that about would be the apathy towards politics leading to a situation where people did not actually exercise their right to vote, and therefore some power got into control that gradually edged our society in that direction.
I think the biggest danger to any of our societies is not from without, but from within.
And I just wanted to touch base again with you, Mr. Cochran, about the MP3 thing and how you said the Hollywood and the music industry will have to change.
A little bit of quick background.
I'm a musician.
I've been so for the last 25 years.
And it seems to me that in the 50s, records were only handed out to promote the artists coming to your town so that your butt would get on the grass and come and see us in the venues.
Seems to me that the record industry over the last 50 years has tried to justify the massive profits that they take from the artists by saying for every one artist that makes it, 100 of them don't.
Being a guy that's been creative for the last 20 years, I'm really getting tired of paying for the people that aren't making it.
And if I can get my music directly to the kids for download and get their butts in the grass where I get my muckers on their 10 bucks, then the industry does.
There are an awful lot of artists that are actually going straight to a website.
They're not going through the recording industry at all.
And this is allowing people to hear more music.
I think one of the things that is really disturbing is the fact that more and more people are now listening to music artificial, If you like, and live than ever before.
When I was a child, very, very few people got to hear either a pop group or an orchestra or any other form of music live because it was too expensive.
Now, we can sample the goods extensively, decide that we really like you as an artist, and then make the ultimate effort to travel to come and see you at one of your concerts, and that seems to work.
In the UK, there are at least one pop group that make all their money out of concerts, and they just use the recording industry and the internet as a means of advertising, which is really where it started.
And Peter, I've been holding and listening to you.
What I wanted to share with you is I'm a retired consultant, technology consultant, and I wanted to just tell you that the easiest form of communication to compromise and tape is information that goes through the air.
You know, I'm saying, like, it doesn't matter if it's microwave or whatever.
Well, it's just, I caught you all talking about privacy, and there's a discussion over, you know, security and stuff and someone's ability, you know, to access that information.
You know, I'm just saying that that's one of the easiest to do.
Sir, 128-bit encryption can be applied to something that goes through the air as well.
So, I mean, there is security.
Yes, you might intercept it.
That doesn't mean you'll understand it.
unidentified
I was about to get to the encryption portion of it.
As I'm sure that you well know, there's always some bad apples out there, and that's where these black boxes come from that are created to steal this kind of information.
You know, I kind of, well, we kind of refer to them as rogue engineers or rogue scientists or what have you.
The motion picture expert skill, the joint pictures expert skill, MPEG, JPEG, they used to have pictures on the internet.
But because people were downloading them and selling them, they changed it and you could only get a thumbnail.
I think it's an inevitability for people like that, and it'll be on a basis of no choice for them.
But for people like you and I, it will be by choice.
So I think the honest citizens will have a choice of whether they want to do something or not, and I think the dishonest ones that are gross offenders will have no choice.
Peter, all in all, with this emerging technology, do you think that it is more advantage to mankind than it is disadvantage and robbing him of his upside to me is so enormous.
Just to add another strapline for your caller there.
Quite a number of convictions in the UK have been made on the basis that some criminals said it wasn't me, I wasn't there, but their mobile phone was, and they've been actually convicted on the basis that they've been able to say that their mobile phone was actually in the area where the crime was committed, and that's just blown their alibi out of the water.
So, you know, that gives me a deal of joy, if you like, that the bad guys get it.
But I just look at the upside.
There's all of the worries about the technology.
My favourite one is cooking your brain with a mobile phone.
No evidence to support that.
The number of people survived tremendous medical problems, accidents, and what have you, and have been saved by mobile phones.