12-Jan-2023
An abbreviated (de-clawed) version of this article appeared in The British Computer Society magazine iTNOW in November 2022.
I think that, for Information Technology, most of us would agree about most of the following list:
For me this means not doing anything to help tobacco companies, gambling companies, or companies that are harming, or failing to reduce harm to, people or the environment. There are many human activities that cause harm in more subtle ways than tobacco and gambling, and often the boundaries are fuzzy. I believe that we have a duty to check the boundaries in the opportunities that are presented to us, and to make the best decisions we can to do no harm. This may mean turning down some personal opportunities.
We are lucky to work in such an interesting industry and to be able to earn a good living from our work. We have a duty to be diligent. Different people learn in different ways. I once had a technical support team member who was completely self-taught. He was brilliant in giving good advice to our customers. He later went on to be head of engineering for a successful software company in Silicon Valley, and then became CTO for a large finance company that is an international household name. Most of us benefit from more formal training, and the work that BCS does in this area is very welcome.
Working with insufficient knowledge and skills is likely to be harmful and is therefore not ethical.
As IT professionals we rarely have full view of how the data we manage will be used. I have seen data processed carelessly, with plausible results considered acceptable. "Plausible" is not enough. We need to be as sure as we can that the data is as reliable as we can possibly make it and that we have tested its accuracy thoroughly.
Unfortunately some people in the industry do not live up to this. I recently asked a project manager from a major consultancy how they would reconcile the migration of a 100-miilion-record data set, and he said "we'll eyeball a few records".
Errors in data can cause bad judgements that can lose large sums of other people's money, or cause physical danger in transport or medical systems, or miscarriages of justice where the law is involved. If we increase the risk of such bad outcomes, we are not being ethical.
Accuracy in data is necessary, but not enough. We know from Surveillance Capitalism and many other academic and journalistic sources, that our personal data can be stolen and used for massive profits. Very often it is used to sell us things that are harmful to us or to the environment.
There are good guidelines (in the General Data Protection Regulation(GDPR), for example) and we should follow them. I have worked for a large finance company that took "a risk-based approach" to GDPR, and what that meant was "can we get away with it?". They were busy stealing personal data and strongly resisted any attempt to limit this activity. That was not ethical.
What could be put ahead of users' needs? Profit, laziness, focus on something that is technically "cool", but does not help the user. Profit usually trumps everything.
The Big Tech companies are aggressively selling their products, which are very frequently more expensive, more complex, more resource-hungry than they need to be. In recent years, I have been working with some leading charities and the onslaught from the likes of Google, Microsoft, Salesforce and so-called "cryptocurrency" organisations has been staggering. In most cases they make false promises in order to suck money out of organisations, money that should be spent on doing good in the world. Redirecting this money to their shareholders is not ethical.
Computers use electrical power and rare-earth minerals. We do need to use computers to make things better in the world, but we also need to be frugal.
Currently blockchain-based systems are the worst offenders for wasting energy. The two biggest so-called "cryptocurrencies" (Bitcoin and Ethereum) use about the same power as the UK. The UK uses power to support its 68 million people, heating homes, cooking food, transport, hospitals, schools, businesses and so on. We need to do this more efficiently, but most of this energy use is necessary. To waste that much energy, which is what blockchains do, is a crime against our environment. They also waste computers, including the rare-earth elements that they use, and all the energy that goes into their manufacture.
I was working with a major international, multi-billion dollar consultancy recently. We ended up with one person trying to deliver a major new system, almost single-handed. He had come to the UK from South Africa about 9 months before. We worked with him, and tried to help him, since he had no time for learning and was working beyond his knowledge and capabilities. One of our team asked him what he thought of London, what had he seen, what had he done here. He said that he had not seen anything because he had been working 7 days a week ever since he arrived.
This way of working is exploitative. It is bad for the employee and bad for the client. There are lots of billable hours, but very poor quality of work.
Since computer technology is a mystery to most people, many companies have become rich by saying what their users want to hear, when, in fact, they can deliver much less than this.
The Review of Microsoft Dynamics 365 on this website is an extreme illustration of this. Microsoft income from Dynamics 365 is now over $5 billion a year. It achieves this by promising the earth and delivering an inefficient, badly designed, massively-over-priced product. Read the review for my justification for saying this.
An even worse over-selling job is done by the blockchain-based, so-called "crypto" enterprise, much of which is actually criminal.
Blockchain technology does not do any good for the world. A blockchain is not a database; it is a one-dimensional list of transactions. It is extremely inefficient. It is also vulnerable to fraud on an unimaginable scale. See the explanation of how it works and why it is so bad
Because of this name, people believe that the blockchain is encrypted. "Crypto", and the blockchains that support it are not encrypted. You can go and read the contents of blockchains on sites such as bitaps.com. You will see lots of long identifiers there, looking like this: "bc1qhvc7tmvewztksq0wshnmyx0r7h4zqdtnaqmgtn". These are not encrypted, there is no mechanism to decrypt them to something else, they are just identifiers, like your bank account number but longer and more difficult to remember. These identifiers are used for wallets, transactions, etc. They are generated by "hash functions". (See my talk if you want to know what a hash function is.) Hash functions are used in cryptography and they have other applications. Blockchains are one of the other applications, using hash functions to generate very long unique identifiers.
The "currency" word is also inapplicable to these things. Blockchain based "coins" cannot be used as currency because they are so volatile. If you were paid in blockchain-based tokens, the pay you receive for work you do, could be worth 20% more or less when you received it than it is when you buy your groceries the next day. Leave it a week and it could be worth 60% less. We have seen hyper-inflation in some troubled societies and it is devastating.
The transaction fees are also variable and can be outrageous. There are no transaction fees for cash, and most payment cards have trasaction fees of 1%-3%. With blockchain transactions there are the fees are highly variable and even exceed to transaction value in some cases. Cash and card transactions take a very small number of seconds. Blockchain transactions take at least 9 minutes. Imagine the supermarket queues if we all used blockchain systems.
The term “cryptoasset” is also wildly misleading. The only thing you can own in a blockchain-based system is a “token” which is a unique number on a blockchain. There is no physical or legal link between the blockchain token you own and the digital artwork, or first tweet, or copy of the US consitution, that it nominally represents. You do not have exclusive access to the Bored Ape, nor copyright, nor licensing rights. You just own a number on a blockchain. On top of that your precious token can easily be stolen - it happens all the time.
I refer to "blockchain-based systems" because that does cover "crypto-currencies", "crypto-assets", "non-fungible tokens" ("NFT"s if you must), "distributed autonomous organisations" ("DAOs" if you must), the distributed (or decentralised) ledger, and anything described as "Web-3". These all depend on, and exist to support, the corrupt "business model" of blockchains.
The use of the word "distributed" is misleading because blockchain is an extreme form of distributed data. It would be more accurate to describe it is "replicated" since the whole blockchain is copied to every site using it, including all 8,000 miners (it was 8,036 on 21-Mar-2023 - it does vary).
Most files are stored on disk as a sequence of blocks. Inside each block there are records, possibly of varying sizes. File systems usually present records to applications, so that the applications do not need to be aware of the blocks.
This diagram respresents a file with 20 blocks.
In a distributed file system, the blocks are distributed across multiple disks on multiple servers. Each server with its disk is called a "node". Usually each block is stored on more than one node, so that, if a node fails, the whole file can be recreated from the blocks on other nodes. This makes the file system resilient. It is typical to have three copies of each block on different nodes, like this:
We can see that block 2 appears in nodes A, E and H. Block 6 appears in nodes A, F and G, and so on.
In blockchains, the whole file, with all its blocks, is stored in every node. This is extremely inefficient, and puts a brake on the size of the blockchain. The blockchain is massively replicated, not distributed.
Most Big Tech companies claim that blockchains:
All of these quotations were accessed, on the links given, on 4th February, 2023. If so-called "cryptocurrencies" continue to lose their shine, then we can expect some of these wild claims to be quietly dropped - this has happened to quotations that I found earlier.
These quotations are from our biggest tech service companies and they are peddling lies. All of these claims are false. They are encouraging vast waste of energy. They are also legitimising a technology which has caused billions of dollars of losses to ordinary people who were victims of the porous security and imagined opportunity of blockchain systems.
Many people say that the companies I have mentioned are "well-established", "reputable" and "trusted". "Well-established" usually means big. These are companies that have grown in revenue, locations, staff and profits over many years. The measure of success for such companies is profit, and those most ruthless in increasing profits are seen as the most "well-established". You can often trust these companies to give good returns if you are an investor. When it comes to using their products and services, that trust is not so well-founded.
It gets worse. On 4 April 2022 the UK Government website reported that the then "Chancellor of the Exchequer, Rishi Sunak said:
"It’s my ambition to make the UK a global hub for cryptoasset technology [...] Stablecoins are a form of cryptoasset that [...] could provide a more efficient means of payment and widen consumer choice.
"The government intends to legislate to bring stablecoins – where used as a means of payment – within the payments regulatory perimeter, creating conditions for stablecoins issuers and service providers to operate and invest in the UK".
On the same day, the Economic Secretary to the Treasury, John Glen said at the Innovate Finance Global Summit:
"we want this country to be a global hub - the very best place in the world to start and scale crypto-companies."
"We are already effectively using crypto-technologies to make government more efficient. We are developing opportunities to use distributed ledger technology for Customs and International Trade, to ease the import of goods, and we will continue to support further opportunities to deploy that technology"
"Finally, I am announcing today that the Chancellor has asked the Royal Mint to create a non-fungible token – an NFT… to be issued by the Summer, an emblem of the forward-looking approach we are determined to take"
He also announced that the UK will proactively explore the potentially transformative benefits of Distributed Ledger Technology (DLT) in UK financial markets, which enables data to be synchronized and shared in a decentralised way to potentially achieve greater efficiency, transparency and resilience.
By April 2022, Bitcoin had fallen from a high of €58,000 to €30,000 a fall of 48% in 5 months. The volatility of so-called "cryptocurrencies", their disastrous waste of energy and their susceptibility to fraud, were well known at the time. The people responsible for the finances of the UK were driving with their eyes closed.
On 1 February 2023 there was a new announcement. This sounds a bit more cautious, saying "The government will set out ambitious plans to robustly regulate cryptoasset activities", but it still says, "Cryptoassets [...] have a range of potential benefits". No they don't! Unless you're a fraudster. What does this say about our government?
Information Technology systems are complex. Most people do not, and should not have to, understand them. Most people rely on advice from "reputable" companies to help them judge whether a technology or a product is a good investment. Companies that are prepared to promote blockchain technology or other inefficient systems, are not only putting profits before customers they are also exploiting their customers by promoting damaging technology.
Blockchain is the worst of the technologies that these companies are selling. Fortunately, for the world but not for the small investors who have been conned into gambling on "cryptocurrencies", the blockchain bubble is bursting and the big companies are, in some cases at least, sheepishly withdrawing from this technology.
But blockchain is not the only technology that is being mis-sold. For decades, these big companies have been selling demoware and making big money from it, leaving a trail of very expensive, and often completely failed systems behind them.
The problem for Big Tech companies is that bespoke development of individual systems is not very profitable, and some the best technologies used in bespoke developments are free. Databases (such as PostgreSQL), Development languages (such as Java, JavaScript, Python), source code control systems (Subversion, Git), wikis (Trac), testing tools (Cypress, Selenium) are all free, so vendors cannot make money from them.
Instead the Big Tech companies produce ostensibly generic systems, which they can demonstrate easily but that require huge customisation by their "Gold" partners. These systems come with high licence fees, add-on costs for disk usage, data-transfer, interactive usages costs, and so on. The costs rapidly rise into the millions of pounds.
These systems fail more often than one would expect and do waste many millions of pounds.
Unskilled individuals often fail too. The direct costs are usually a lot lower, but there can be serious impact on an organisation that needed a system and finds after a year or two's work that their system has not appeared in any usable form. As individuals we have responsibilities too. Our failures discredit the many diligent system developers, and can be the gateway-drug to the multi-million pound promises from the Big Tech vendors.
We need more awareness of good design and good development practices. We need these to feed into procurement decisions. Every system selection panel should have representation from at least one "techie" with a proven track record and the communication skills to explain what the proposed solution means to the panel and to the organisation they represent.
Public training and certification programmes must make sure that they are relevant and based on sound engineering principles without prejudice by commercial interests. In some cases we should refuse to endorse technologies that we know are harmful. No-one should provide or endorse blockchain courses, nor should they publish material that endorses or promotes them, even if the source is a "well-established" company.
This man:
attempted to defraud a charity of £2 million and got a prison sentence of 5 years and 3 months.
These two companies
take many millions of pounds every year from UK charities and they get... richer!