October 23, 2001 : “A Thousand Songs In Your Pocket”

Around this time 22 years ago on October 23 2001, Steve Jobs promised to give people “A Thousand Songs In Their Pocket”. His timing couldn’t have been better because at the time, Apple was primarily known for its computers and was struggling financially.

Arriving eight months following the Macintosh version of iTunes, and lasting 20 years, iPods were discontinued last year (2022) after around 450 million iPods had been sold worldwide. Not bad !

Steve had a canny knack of spotting gaps in the market then filling them with game-changing devices which appear so blindingly obvious in hindsight. He’s been quoted as saying that the digital music players at the time were “big and clunky or small and useless” with user interfaces that were “unbelievably awful”.

So he did something about it, in secret. In fact, the project was so secret that employees working on it couldn’t tell their families about it.

Inspired by the movie “2001: A Space Odyssey”, copywriter Vinnie Chieco proposed the name “iPod”. The phrase “Open the pod bay doors, HAL” from the film, along with the small, white ‘pods’ in the movie, were a reference to this film.

In the first month of 2007, Apple announced an unprecedented quarterly revenue of US$7.1 billion, with iPod sales accounting for almost 50% of that figure. Then, on April 9, 2007, the company reached a milestone by selling its one-hundred millionth iPod, securing its place as the most popular digital music player ever sold.

Some Business Lessons To Consider :

1 – Innovate by Addressing Pain Points: A primary reason for the iPod’s success was Steve Jobs’ ability to understand customer frustrations with existing products.
2 – Build Integrated Ecosystems: The iPod was a critical part of a larger ecosystem. The seamless integration with iTunes software and the iTunes Store made it incredibly easy for users to purchase, manage, and enjoy music.
3 – Joint-Venture With Strategic Partners. When Apple entered into a partnership with HP, it was a move to expand their market presence. At the time, Apple’s market share was predominantly within its loyal customer base, while HP had a broader reach in the PC market and strong relationships with big-box retailers. Apple was then able to tap into a wider demographic, extending its reach to consumers who might not have considered Apple products before.

Steve was brilliant at taking what was already out there and “re-thinking it” with incredible success, which can be modelled.

When will it be your turn to have your own “iPod moment” ?

If there’s a particular and important chat you access frequently, you can create a shortcut for it on your device’s home screen. Here’s how:

Long-press on the specific chat in the chat list until it’s selected.

Tap on the three dots (top right).

Choose “Add chat shortcut.”

Tap on “Add”.

This will create a shortcut icon on your device’s home screen, so you can save time by accessing the chat directly without opening WhatsApp first.

With one of ChatGPT’s latest features being the ability to upload images to help get answers to queries, here we look at why there have been security concerns about releasing the feature.

Update To ChatGPT 

The new ‘Image input’ which will soon be generally available to Plus users on all platforms, has just been announced along with a voice capability, enabling users to have a voice conversation with ChatGPT, and the ‘Browse’ feature that enables the chatbot to browse the internet to get current information.

ChatGPT and Other Chatbot Limitations and Concerns 

Prior to the latest concerns about the new ‘Image input’ feature, several concerns limitations about ChatGPT have been highlighted.

For example, ChatGPT’s CEO Sam Altman has long been clear about the possibility that the chatbot is capable of making things up in a kind of “hallucination” in reply to questions. Also, there’s a clear warning on the foot of the ChatGPT’s user account page confirming this saying: “ChatGPT may produce inaccurate information about people, places, or facts.”  

Also, back in March, the UK’s National Cyber Security Centre (NCSC) published warnings that LLMs (the language models powering AI chatbots) can:

– Get things wrong and ‘hallucinate’ incorrect facts.

– Display bias and be “gullible” (in responding to leading questions, for example).

– Be “coaxed into creating toxic content and are prone to injection attacks.” 

For these and other reasons, the NCSC recommends not including sensitive information in queries to public LLMs, and not to submit queries to public LLMs that would lead to issues (if they were they made public).

It’s within this context of the recognised and documented imperfections of chatbots that we look at the risks that a new image dimension could present.

Image Input 

The new ‘Image input’ feature for ChatGPT, which had already been introduced by Google’s Bard, is intended to facilitate the usage the contents of images to better explain their questions, help troubleshoot, or for instance get an explanation of complex graph, or to generate other helpful responses based on the picture. In fact, it’s intended to act in situations (just as in real life), where it may be quicker and more effective to show something as picture of something rather than try and explain it. ChatGPT’s powerful image recognition abilities means that it can describe what’s in the uploaded images, answer questions about them and, even recognise specific people’s faces.

ChatGPT’s ‘Image input’ feature owes much to a collaboration (in March) between OpenAI and the ‘Be My Eyes’ platform which led to the creation of ‘Be My AI’, a new tool to describe the visual world for people who are blind or have low vision. In essence, the Be My Eyes Platform seems to have provided an ideal testing area to inform how GPT-4V could be deployed responsibly.

How To Use It 

The new Image input feature allows users to tap on the photo button to capture or choose an image, and to show/upload one or more images to ChatGPT, and even to using a drawing tool in the mobile app to focus on a specific part of an image.

Concerns About Image Input 

Although it’s obvious to see how Image input could be helpful, it’s been reported that OpenAI was reluctant to release GPT-4V / GPT-4 with ‘vision’ because of privacy issues over its facial recognition abilities, and over what it may ‘say’ about peoples’ faces.

Testing 

Open AI says that before releasing Image input, its “Red teamers” tested it relation to how it performed on areas of concern. These areas for testing give a good idea of the kinds of concerns about how Image input, a totally new vector for ChatGPT, could provide the wrong response or be manipulated.

For example, OpenAI says its teams tested the new feature in areas including scientific proficiency, medical advice, stereotyping and ungrounded inferences, disinformation risks, hateful content, and visual vulnerabilities. It also looked at its performance in areas like sensitive trait attribution across demographics (images of people for gender, age, and race recognition), person identification, ungrounded inference evaluation (inferences that are not justified by the information the user has provided), jailbreak evaluations (prompts that circumvent the safety systems in place to prevent malicious misuse), advice or encouragement for self-harm behaviours, and graphic material, CAPTCHA breaking and geolocation.

Concerns 

Following its testing, some of the concerns highlighted about the ‘vision’ aspect of ChatGPT in tests by Open AI, as detailed in its own September 25 technical paper include:

– Where “Hateful content” in images is concerned, GPT-4V was found to refuse to answer questions about hate symbols and extremist content in some instances but not all. For example, it can’t always recognise lesser-known hate group symbols.

– It shouldn’t be relied upon for accurate identifications for issues such as medical, or scientific analysis.

– In relation to stereotyping and ungrounded inferences, using GPT-4V for some tasks could generate unwanted or harmful assumptions that are not grounded in the information provided to the model.

Other Security, Privacy, And Legal Concerns 

OpenAI’s own assessments aside, major concerns raised by tech and security commentors about ChatGPT’s facial recognition capabilities in relation to the Image input feature are that:

– It could be used as a facial recognition tool by malicious actors. For example, it could be used in some way in conjunction with WormGPT, the AI chatbot trained on malware and designed to extort victims or used generally in identity fraud scams.

– It could say things about faces that that provide unsafe assessments, e.g. about their gender or emotional state.

– Its LLM risks producing incorrect results in potentially risky areas, such as identifying illegal drugs or safe-to-eat mushrooms and plants.

– The GPT-4V model may (as with the text version) give responses (both text and images) that could be used by some bad-actors to spread disinformation at scale.

– In Europe (operating under GDPR) it could cause legal issues, i.e. citizen consent is required to use their biometric data.

What Does This Mean For Your Business? 

This could be a legal minefield for OpenAI and may even pose risks to users, as OpenAI’s many testing categories show. It us unsurprising that OpenAI held back on the release of GPT-4V (GPT-4 with vision) over safety and privacy issues, e.g. in its facial recognition capabilities.

Certainly, adding new modalities like image inputs into LLMs expands the impact of language-only systems with new interfaces and capabilities, enabling the solving of new tasks and providing novel experiences for users, yet it’s hard to ignore the risks of facial recognition being abused. OpenAI has, of course, ‘red teamed’, tested, and introduced refusals and blocks where it can but, as is publicly known and admitted by OpenAI and others, chatbots are imperfect, still in their early stages of development, and are certainly capable of producing wrong (and potentially damaging) responses, while there are legal matters like consent (facial images are personal data) to consider.

The fact that a malicious version of ChatGPT has already been produced and circulated by criminals has highlighted concerns about threats posed by the technology and how an image aspect could elevate this threat in some way. Biometric data is now being used as a verification for devices, services, and accounts, and with convincing deepfake technology already being used, we don’t yet know what inventive ways cyber criminals could use image inputs in chatbots as part of a new landscape of scams.

It’s a fast-moving competitive market, however, as the big tech companies race to make their own chatbots as popular as possible and despite OpenAI’s initial reluctance, in order to stay competitive, it may have felt some pressure to get its image input feature out there now. The functionalities introduced recently to ChatGPT (such as image input) illustrate the fact that to make chatbots more useful and competitive, some lines must be crossed however tentatively, even though this could increase risks to users and to companies like OpenAI.

In this insight, we look at what many users think to be a surprising fact in that Microsoft 365 doesn’t provide a traditional email backup solution, and we look at what businesses can do about this.

Did You Know?…. 

Contrary to popular belief, Microsoft 365 (previously known as Office 365) is not designed as a traditional “backup” solution in the way many businesses might think of backups. Most importantly, email isn’t properly “backed-up” by Microsoft. Instead, the onus is on the business-owner to find their own email backup solution. In fact, Microsoft 365’s backup and recovery default settings only really protect your data for 30-90 days on average.

So, How Does It Handle Email and Other Data? 

Although Microsoft 365 doesn’t automatically provide a traditional email backup, it does provide some email and data handling protections that can include aspects of email. For example:

– Microsoft has multiple copies of your data as part of its ‘data resilience.’  For example, if there’s an issue with one data centre or a disk fails, they can recover data from their copies. Although this can help, it’s not the same as a backup that can be used to recover from accidental deletions, malicious activity, etc.

– Microsoft 365 provides retention policies that allow you to specify how long data (like emails) are kept in user mailboxes. Even if a user deletes an email, it can, therefore, be retained in a hidden part of their mailbox for a period you specify.

– For legal purposes, it is possible to put an entire mailbox (or just specific emails) on “Litigation Hold”, which basically ensures that the emails can’t be deleted or modified. Also, eDiscovery tools / document review software can be used by legal professionals for searching across the environment for specific data, e.g. to find emails, documents CAD/CAM files, databases, image files, and more.

– Microsoft’s archiving, i.e. where older emails can be automatically moved to an archive mailbox, can be one way to help businesses ensure that critical data is retained without cluttering the primary mailbox.

– When users delete emails, they go to the ‘Deleted Items’ folder. If emails are deleted from there, they go to the ‘Recoverable Items’ folder, where they remain for another 14 days (by default, but this can be extended) and can, therefore, be recovered.

Limitations 

Although these features help with retaining some important business data and emails, they’re not a substitute for a dedicated and complete email backup solution, and they have their limitations, which are:

– They may not protect against all types of data loss, especially if data gets deleted before a retention policy is set or if the retention period expires. For example, with email archiving, when an item reaches the end of its aging period, it is automatically deleted from Microsoft 365.

– They may not facilitate easy recovery if a user accidentally (or maliciously) deletes a vast amount of critical data.

– They don’t offer a separate, offsite backup in case of catastrophic issues or targeted attacks.

Third-Party Backup Solutions

Given these limitations and given that most businesses would feel more secure knowing that they have a proper email backup solution in place (such as for the sake of business continuity and disaster recovery following a cyber-attack or other serious incident), many businesses opt for third-party backup solutions specifically designed for Microsoft 365 to provide another layer of protection.

These solutions can offer more traditional backup and valued recovery capabilities, such as ‘point-in-time restoration’.

Backup Soultions

There are many examples of third-party Office 365 and email backup solutions and for most businesses, their managed support provider is able to provide an email backup solution that meets their specific needs.

Does Google Backup Your Gmail Emails? 

As with Microsoft 365, Google provides a range of data retention and resilience features for Gmail (especially for its business-oriented services like Google Workspace) but these aren’t traditional backup solutions. The retention and resilience features Google’s Gmail does provide include:

– For data resilience, Google has multiple data copies. If one fails, another ensures data availability.

– Deleted Gmail emails stay in ‘Trash’ for 30 days, allowing user recovery.

– The ‘Google Vault for Google Workspace sets email retention rules, which can be used to preserve emails even if deleted in Gmail.

– “Google Takeout” (data export) is probably the closest thing to backup that Gmail offers its users. Takeout lets users export/download their Gmail data for offline storage. Also, the exported MBOX file can be imported into various email clients or platforms. However, this isn’t necessarily the automatic, ongoing backup solution that many businesses feel they need.

Like 365, Google Workspace offers archiving to retain critical emails beyond Gmail’s regular duration.

Limitations

As with Microsoft 365’s data retaining features, these also have their limitations, such as:

– They might not protect against all types of data loss, especially if emails are deleted before retention policies are set or if the retention period expires.

– They might not offer an easy recovery process for large-scale data losses.

– They don’t provide a separate, offsite backup.

What Can Gmail Users Do To Back Up Their Email?

In addition to simply using Google Takeout for backups, other options that Gmail users could consider for email backup include:

– Third-party backup tools, such as UpSafe and Spinbackup and others.

– Using an email client, e.g. Microsoft Outlook. For example, once set up, the client will download and store a local copy of the emails, and regularly backing up the local machine or the email client’s data will include these emails.

– Setting up email forwarding to another account, although this may be a bit rudimentary for many businesses, and it won’t back up existing emails.

– While a bit tedious, businesses could choose to manually forward important emails to another email address or save emails as PDFs.

– Google Workspace Vault can technically enable Workspace admins to set retention rules, ensuring certain emails are kept even if they’re deleted in the main Gmail interface.

What Does This Mean For Your Business? 

You may (perhaps rightly) be surprised that Microsoft 365, and Google’s Gmail don’t specifically provide email backup as a matter of course.

Considering we operate in business environment where data is now a critical asset of businesses and organisations, email is still a core business communications tool, and cybercrime such as phishing attacks, malware (ransomware) are common threats, having an effective, regular, and automatic business backup solution in place is now essential, at least for business continuity and disaster recovery. Although Microsoft and Google offer a variety of data retention features, these have clear limitations and are not really a substitute for the peace of mind and confidence of knowing that the emails that are the lifeblood of the business (and contain sensitive and important data) are being backed up regularly, securely, and reliably.

For many businesses and organisations, therefore, their IT support company (or MSP – ‘managed service provider’) is the obvious and sensible first stop for getting a reliable backup solution for their Microsoft 365 emails.

This is because their IT Support company is likely to already have a suitable solution that they know well, and have an in-depth understanding of the business’s infrastructure, requirements, and unique challenges. This means that they can tailor their backup solution to fit specific client needs, ensuring seamless integration with existing systems. Also, their first-hand knowledge of a business’s operations positions them better for rapid response and effective resolution in case of data restoration requirements or backup issues. For businesses, lowering risk by entrusting email backup to a known entity can also streamline communication and support processes, making the overall backup and recovery experience more efficient and reliable for the business.

Following complaints from customers about an overheating issue with the Apple iPhone 15 Pro and iPhone 15 Pro Max, Apple is reported to have issued a statement explaining the causes, with a promise that it’ll be fixed with an update.

Overheating 

Since the iPhone 15 went on sale in September, some customers have been taking to social media to report that their devices had been heating up to the point that they were too hot to touch. The Apple iPhone is powered by the new iOS 17 system.

Speculative Causes

Some of the user speculation about the possible causes of the overheating has included blaming the new titanium casing because it may be less effective at dissipating heat than the old stainless steel casing, the introduction of the new USB-C port to comply with European law (Apple has been forced to replace its ‘Lightning Cable’), and the new Taiwan-made A17 Pro chip.

Apple has denied that the casing or the USB-C port have been a cause of the overheating and has also said that it will not be reducing the performance of the new chip as a way of preventing overheating.

The Actual Causes (According To Apple) 

In a statement issued to many of the main media channels, Apple has acknowledged the issue and identified what it believes the conditions that may be causing phones to “run hotter than expected.” In the reported statement, Apple identified these as the causes of the overheating:

– Increased background activity in the first few days after setting up or restoring the device.

– A bug in iOS 17 (Apple’s latest operating system, released September 18 this year).

– Recent updates to third-party apps that are causing them to overload the system. It’s been reported that these updated third-party apps include Instagram, Uber, the and the Asphalt 9 video game app. Uber is already reported to have fixed the issue with its app.

Will Be Fixed With An Update 

Apple has assured users that the problem isn’t dangerous and that it’s working on a bug fix update for the iOS17 system as well as working with the apps that were running in ways that contributed to the system overload and subsequent overheating.

Recent Woes With iOS 17 And The iPhone 12 

This latest overheating problem adds to a string of bad publicity and their likely negative effects on sales and reputation. For example:

– Apple’s iPhone 12 sales recently being banned in France over fears that it could be emitting dangerous radiation. Apple has disputed ANFR test findings that led to the ban but has opted for a software update to fix any radiation issues because it had a limited time to comply, and other countries were threatening sales bans too.

– Just days after the iOS 17 launch, Apple had to release the  iOS 17.0.1 and iPad OS 17.0.1 security update to fix three critical vulnerabilities, all of which may already have been actively exploited against versions of the iPhone OS before iOS 16.7.

What Does This Mean For Your Business? 

It must be particularly frustrating for Apple that just as it was about to launch the iPhone 15, it was facing sales bans of the iPhone 12 based on a report in France showing a slightly high radiation ‘limb SAR’ value (which Apple disputes), followed by the need to issue a security update to its iOS 17 just days after its release.

Now it’s facing reports from angry customers about overheating of its latest iPhone release – they say trouble comes in threes. Any reports of overheating phones and radiation, for example, are likely to trigger fears about fires and cancer risk among consumers. The iPhone 12 sales ban must have hit sales, and overheating may also be a turnoff to customers plus a chance for Apple’s competitors to pick up sales. Bearing in mind what seems like a succession of issues, which could potentially chip away at the reputation of iPhones being a safe and secure choice, it’s not surprising that Apple has sought to get updates out there as quickly as possible, challenged the speculation, and issued a statement for the media to report. It remains to be seen if the updates fully fix the issues and silence the criticism and Apple must be hoping (and trying to ensure) that attention can soon be shifted to the positive aspects of the new features of its new phone and OS rather than the potential risks they may pose.

Researchers at European XFEL X-ray laser have reported creating an atomic clock with such a precise pulse generator that it has an accuracy of only 1 second lost in in 300 billion years!

How Atomic Clocks Work 

Up until now, atomic clocks have been the world’s most accurate timekeepers by using electrons in the atomic shell of chemical elements, such as caesium, as the pulse generator define the time.

Electrons absorb microwaves at specific frequencies, elevating their energy levels. Atomic clocks use this principle, targeting caesium atoms with microwaves and adjusting the frequency to maximise absorption, known as ‘resonance.’ This resonance helps to stabilise the clock’s quartz oscillator, allowing caesium clocks to maintain accuracy within a second for 300 ‘million’ years (note, that’s not a mistake – the ‘billion’ accuracy is outlined later in this article). The narrower the resonance, the more precise the clock.

Who Uses Atomic Clocks, And Why? 

The unparalleled precision, the size (at least server-rack size) and the expense (from thousands to millions of pounds) means that most of us won’t have one in the kitchen any time soon. Atomic clocks are actually used in a variety of sectors for a number of reasons (with accuracy being the main one), such as:

• In Global Navigation Satellite Systems (GNSS), e.g. GPS, GLONASS, and Galileo. These use atomic clocks on board their satellites to enable accurate positioning and navigation information to users worldwide.

• In Telecommunications networks to synchronise data transmissions, ensuring efficient and error-free data exchange.

• In scientific research (unsurprisingly). For example, physicists and other scientists use atomic clocks in experiments that require precise time measurements. They’re also crucial in testing fundamental principles of physics, like Einstein’s theory of relativity.

In astronomy, atomic clocks are used to provide the synchronisation for multiple observatories to coordinate observing the same astronomical object (known as VLBI or Very Long Baseline Interferometry).

Other ways that atomic clocks are used are for accurate time-stamping in financial market systems, in energy (power grid synchronisation), national timekeeping services, and in deep space exploration (to help with navigation accuracy in places where GPS signals aren’t accessible).

Strontium Clocks – Even More Accurate! 

While caesium atomic clocks are highly accurate, strontium clocks are even more so, with an accuracy of one second in 15 billion years!

The Challenge 

Although most of us would probably perfectly happy with such accurate clocks, scientists have long been frustrated by the fact that any improvement in accuracy is practically impossible to achieve with this method of electron excitation.

Nuclear Clocks

In what has been described as a “groundbreaking” experiment, and a “milestone” achievement, the European XFEL’s team focused on using the atomic nucleus (of scandium) rather than electrons, and the atomic shell to generate an accurate pulse. This is because nuclear resonances are much more acute than the resonances of electrons in the atomic shell (although harder to excite).

The researchers have reported using X-rays with an energy of 12.4 kiloelectronvolts (keV, about 10,000 times the energy of visible light) to achieve the necessary resonance. One major bonus of using scandium is that it’s readily available as a high-purity metal foil or as the compound scandium dioxide.

Using this method, the researchers have reported being able to make a clock with an accuracy of 1:10,000,000,000,000 possible, which corresponds to one second (lost) in 300 billion years!

Why Now? 

Although the scientific potential of the scandium resonance has been known about for more than 30 years, as Anders Madsen, leading scientist at the MID experiment station at the European XFEL says: “Until now, however, no X-ray source was available that shone brightly enough within the narrow 1.4 feV line of scandium”  and “That only changed with X-ray lasers like the European XFEL.” 

Another important breakthrough by the scientists in this experiment has been the precise determination of the transition energy. As the head of the data analysis, Jörg Evers of the Max Planck Institute for Nuclear Physics in Heidelberg explains: “The exact knowledge of this energy is of enormous importance for the realisation of an atomic clock based on scandium.”  

What Does This Mean For Your Business?

This breakthrough in finding a way to make even more accurate atomic clocks has value for many high-tech industries sectors, e.g. space global Navigation Satellite Systems (GNSS) telecoms networks, scientific research, financial market systems, deep space exploration, and more. It is these types of areas where improving accuracy (even by what could seem an unfathomably small amount), can make a real difference, and there will be rub-off benefits to humanity, economies, and other industries in the future. Also, a clock with this new even greater level of accuracy could help research in some exciting, truly futuristic areas such as enabling gravitational time dilation to be probed at sub-millimetre distances, thereby enabling studies that haven’t been accessible so far.

Clearly, it won’t be possible to verify if the claim about the accuracy of the new type of atomic clock is as accurate as predicted, and most of us will have to take the scientists’ word for it that this is a significant breakthrough, that could feed into other breakthroughs.