The fall of Silk Road isn't the end for anonymous marketplaces, Tor or bitcoin

Silk Road, gone but not forgotten. FBI

Ross Ulbricht, aka the “Dread Pirate Roberts”, has been sentenced to life in prison without parole by a Manhattan Federal Court for masterminding the Silk Road anonymous online illegal marketplace. Ulbricht was labelled a drug dealer and criminal profiteer, and Judge Forrest was unequivocal in stating that “a message must be sent out that no one is above the law”.

The Silk Road was an online marketplace designed to allow users to conduct illegal business anonymously beyond the reach of law enforcement. It operated like an eBay for illegal goods, complete with the opportunity for buyers to provide feedback scores to sellers so others could gauge their trustworthiness and quality of product.

The site used a mix of sophisticated privacy technologies to try to hide the identities of its users. Run as a Tor hidden service within the Dark Web, Silk Road’s servers were only accessible through Tor software in order to mask their IP addresses and physical location. Transactions were carried out using bitcoin due to the pseudonymity it affords. Buyers and sellers guides were available on the website to assist in using the technology without detection.

Officially the FBI insists that Ulbricht made mistakes which allowed detectives to uncover his identity and location. The subsequent sites that attempted to follow in its wake were brought down through similar mistakes. But the evidence and explanations given by the FBI in court were not convincing, leading to rumours that the FBI used malware or enlisted the NSA to help track down Silk Road and its users within Tor.

Technological fall-out

It is already known that Tor users are vulnerable at the point that traffic enters and exits the Tor network. Generally though it is thought that users cannot be tracked within the network – but if there is some basis to the speculation that the FBI used malware or enlisted the help of the NSA to bring down the Silk Road then it may be possible that to identify the real internet IP addresses associated with Tor traffic. Certainly this would put an end to any chances of a new Silk Road, and it would also inevitably lead to prosecution of much of the other illegal activity that goes on within the Deep Web. On the other hand, the lack of moves by law enforcement suggests this may not be the case.

You have to go far to find somewhere that accepts bitcoin. Targaryen, CC BY-SA

The limits to the anonymity afforded by bitcoin has also been highlighted. While the value of bitcoins remains within the blockchain, the anonymity persists. But for the owner of bitcoins to realise their value, they must be spent or transferred through exchanges into real-world currency – at which point the owner is liable to be traced. Once a wallet ID has been linked to an individual bitcoin, transactions become highly traceable, as all transactions involving that ID are viewable on the public ledger. This is why governments are choosing to regulate to bitcoin through digital exchanges.

Unless bitcoin becomes more readily accepted then it will be hard for criminals to avoid the temptation to cash out at digital exchanges, linking them to their ill-gotten gains. However, there may be other cryptocurrencies with the means to get around these weaknesses in the future.

So while the Silk Road and several of its immediate successors are gone, the suggestion that the technology behind these marketplaces is flawed is based on speculation that the FBI or NSA have cracked them. If the FBI’s claims that Ulbricht and Blake Benthall of “Silk Road 2.0” were caught due to their own mistakes are true, then it’s still possible for similar anonymous marketplaces to escape prosecution in the future.

Of course, in light of the severe sentence handed to Ulbricht it will depend on whether those would-be entrepreneurs with plans to found other online marketplaces have sufficient belief in the technology’s security to try their luck. So perhaps the judge’s aim in sentencing to deter others could still play a part.

How Bradley Wiggins can break cycling's toughest record

Bradley Wiggins is days away from 60 minutes of horrible pain. Sebastien Nogier/EPA, CC BY

The challenge for Bradley Wiggins is beautifully simple: complete the greatest number of laps of a velodrome track in one hour by pedalling as close as possible to the black racing line. However, the simplicity is deceptive, the pain is intense, and cycling’s hour record requires meticulous preparation in terms of equipment, training and strategy in order to have the best chance of success.

The wind can be a friend to the cyclist, but is more often the foe. This is because the power needed to overcome drag rises in proportion to the cube of velocity, so at 50kmph, more than 90% of the rider’s power output is spent fighting the wind.

A skilled road racer can use the wind to their advantage by slipstreaming to save energy before choosing the prime moment to attack, but when the rider is alone against the clock there is no place to hide. This is why the time-trial is known as the “race of truth” and the hour record, which is held under relatively stable conditions in a velodrome, is possibly the perfect time-trial.

Marginal gains

Alex Dowsett is the current holder of the hour record in a year which has seen a glut of attempts after the sport’s governing body eased back on the rules. On May 2, Dowsett rode to a remarkable distance of 52.937km (Wiggins is targeting 55.250km).

I was lucky enough to help construct the training plan which got Alex there, and the experience offers up some useful insights into just what it takes.

And 52.937 km later, you get to celebrate. Alex Dowsett on the Manchester velodrome. Chris Keller-Jackson

Since Francesco Moser’s successful attempt in 1984 (51.151 km) when he adopted a special skinsuit, disc wheels and low-profile frame, aerodynamics have featured prominently in the technical preparation. People may remember the intriguing battle between Graeme Obree and Chris Boardman as they traded blows over the record and adopted a range of startling on-bike positions in the pursuit of aerodynamic advantage.

Current rules on equipment and riding position are still strict, so any gains come from refinements that take many hours of wind tunnel testing. But they can be found.

Even something as simple as the skinsuit and socks underwent numerous redesigns for Alex‘s attempt to ensure the fabric and fit produced minimal drag. In fact every possible trick of engineering and physics was afforded Alex from the use of custom aero equipment like the disc wheels, frame, handlebars and helmet through to the use of low viscosity lubricants and ceramic bearings.

We even estimated that by heating the velodrome to 28-29 degrees celsius, the reduction in air density and subsequent drag would more than compensate for any loss of performance due to dehydration – although he did still take the precaution of precooling with an ice jacket.

Easing off

Training for the hour is pretty similar to tuning an engine. The key to effective physical preparation is to ensure the training is correctly sequenced and monitored to optimise gains in fitness whilst avoiding overtraining. By employing mostly high volume endurance riding with regular intense intervals and carefully timed races, Alex’s fitness was systematically developed with the goal of generating greater power output for the same blood lactate concentration and heart rate.

However, improvements are often masked by accumulated fatigue so a taper was employed prior to the event whereby training load, but not intensity, was reduced to help recovery without compromising fitness. In spite of research, tapering is still very much an art with many cyclists under-performing if they feel “too fresh”: sometimes as a coach you really can be too good.

Looking for a smart start. Kenneth Lu, CC BY

The hour record is an aerobic event, in fact the intake of air is pretty crucial you might say. But it also demands a significant contribution from those anaerobic Type II muscle fibres which don’t get their energy from oxygen and which are engaged at the tortuous start when the rider is trying to churn a massive gear into life.

Theory states that provided the athlete maintains an even pacing strategy at a power output where heart rate, oxygen uptake and blood lactate concentration remain close to a steady state, then the maximum speed should be achieved. Not only is this sweet spot difficult to judge, but the hour record is raced from a standing start that threatens to immediately over-tax the anaerobic systems which tire quickly. The dilemma for Wiggins will be the same as for every hour record racer: go out too slow and valuable speed is lost; too fast and you are plunged into an oxygen deficit that takes dozens of laps to repay.

The precise mechanisms of fatigue are hotly debated in the literature but what we do know is that as time passes any theoretical steady state is lost: fuel is burnt, chemicals build up which contribute to exhaustion, water is lost and heat accumulates.

The postural muscles throughout the body which maintain the rider’s unnatural aerodynamic position struggle under the strain of high cornering forces and the fixed wheel becomes an instrument of torture with no break from the relentless rhythm of pedalling – there is no freewheeling relief on a track bike. There is some respite as the bike accelerates through each bend, but this is accompanied by an abrupt drop in speed at the start of the following straight. Consequently, the perception of effort rises and the rider’s willpower to continue and ability to hold the line are tested.

Pace planning

And so to the biggest deception of all. During the opening 20 minutes the pace is easily manageable with the freshness of the taper, the warm air, the full aero package and low friction components. The speed is “free” and the temptation to ride too fast is great: many have. The previous record holder, Australia’s Rohan Dennis (52.491km), almost paid the price of an ambitious start to slow significantly later on. And it is not hard to pick out Jack Bobridge’s failed attempt from the chart below.

Comparing the pacing. How the riders have approached this year’s Hour record attempts. B Xavier Disley, PhD

Alex’s hour on the other hand was well-drilled with the pace rehearsed over thousands of training laps. He rode to a strict schedule, never going too deep, never accumulating a debt he could not repay. And in the last third of the race, confident that he had budgeted wisely, he attacked Dennis’s record.

Highlights of Rohan Dennis' record ride.

Was his a “perfect hour” as it was dubbed by his sponsors, or was it too respectful? Maybe it was the euphoria of success, but Alex didn’t show the usual signs of exhaustion at the finish, even lifting his bike above his head in celebration. What is for certain is that Wiggins, having openly pledged to set a record that will stand for many years, cannot afford to hold anything back, not even in the first 20 minutes.

Mini-megalomaniac AI is already all around us, but it won't get further without our help

"Looks like there's an unexpected item in the bagging area, puny human." bagogames, CC BY

Avengers: Age of Ultron is the latest film about robots or artificial intelligence (AI) trying to take over the world. It’s not a new conceit, with the likes of The Terminator, War Games and The Matrix coming before it, but perhaps it’s a theme that rings more resonantly with us these days as intelligent software becomes more widespread.

Perhaps this explains the nagging fears about the potential impact on humanity of artificial super-intelligences – such as Ultron in this film, an AI accidentally created by the Avengers. But what relation do the evil AIs of science fiction have with scientific reality? Could AI take over the world? How would it do so, and why would it bother?

Ulterior motives

We need to consider the staples of motive and opportunity for our movie villain. For the motive, few would say intelligence in itself unswervingly leads to a desire to rule the world. Depicted in films AI is often driven by self-preservation, a realisation that fearful humans might shut them down. It’s what drives HAL 9000 to kill the crew in 2001: A Space Odyssey, and it’s why Ava in Ex Machina plots against her creator.

It seems unlikely we’d ever give our current intelligent software tools cause to feel threatened: they benefit us and there seems little motive in striving to create self-awareness in, for example, software that searches the web for the nearest Italian restaurant.

Another popular motive for the evilness of evil AI is its zealous application of logic. In the Avengers film, Ultron believes that he can only protect the earth by wiping out humanity. This death-by-logic is reminiscent of the notion that a computer would select a stopped clock over one that is two seconds slow, as the stopped clock is at least right twice a day. Ultron’s motivation, based on brittle logic combined with indifference to life, seems at odds with today’s AI systems that can already deal with uncertanty using mathematical formulas and are built to provide productive services for us.

Everybody wants to rule the world

When we consider the opportunity for an AI to rule the world we reach somewhat firmer ground. The famous Turning Test of machine intelligence was set up to measure a particular definition of intelligence, the ability to conduct a believable human conversation. If you can’t tell the difference between AI and human renditions of the same skill, the argument goes, the AI has demonstrated human-like qualities.

So what would a Turing Test for the skill of world domination look like? Compare the antisocial behaviours of AI with the attributes expected of human would-be world dominators. Such megalomaniacs need to control important parts of our lives, such as access to money or ability to travel freely. AI does that already: lending decisions are frequently made by machine intelligence that sifts through mountains of information to decide your creditworthiness. They even trade on the stock market. The intelligence and security services use the same information-gathering and processing to pick suspects out for travel watch lists.

An overlord would give orders and expect them to be followed; anyone who has stood helpless as a self-service till in a shop makes repeated bagging-related demands of them already knows what it feels like to be bossed about by AI.

Even given the motivation, the only world these swarmbots will conquer is one that’s accessible by wheels. Sergey Kornienko, CC BY-SA

Exterminate, exterminate

Finally, no megalomaniac Hollywood robot would be complete without at least some desire to kill us. Today’s military robots can identify targets without human intervention. It’s currently a human controller that gives permission to attack, but it’s not a stretch to say that the potential to kill automatically already exists within these AI, even if their code would require a rewrite to allow it.

These examples arguably show AI in control in limited but significant parts of life on Earth, but to truly dominate the world in the way they do in movies, these individual AIs would need to start working together to create a synchronised AI army. At which point that bossy self-service till talks to your health monitor and denies you beer, then combines with a credit scoring system to provide credit only if you buy a pair of trainers with a built in GPS tracker to detect their use, while your smart fridge allows you only kale until the fitness tracker records the required five-mile run as completed.

Engineers around the world are developing the internet of things, in which all manner of devices are networked together to offer new services and ways to interact. These are the billions of pieces of a jigsaw that would need to communicate and act together in order to bring about total world domination.

No call to welcome our robot overlords yet

If this all sounds worrying, I feel it’s unlikely – about as likely as the inexplicable cross-platform compatibility of an Apple Mac and an alien spaceship in Independence Day.

Our earthly AI and computer systems are written in a range of computer languages, hold different data in different ways and use different and incompatible rule sets and learning techniques. Unless we design them to be compatible there is no reason why two systems, developed by separate companies for separate purposes, would spontaneously communicate and share capabilities towards some greater common goal – at least not without a lot more help from us.

Our predictions of solar storms have not been very accurate until now – here's why

Ain't half hot: but where's it heading? Naeblys

When a space hurricane was unleashed from the sun on January 7 2014, space-weather centres around the world sent out warnings. The hurricane was heading directly for Earth and was predicted to produce a strong geomagnetic storm. But then an unexpected thing happened: the storm bypassed Earth and headed for Mars instead. It confirmed that our techniques for predicting such events are not as accurate as we would like. I am one of the co-authors of a new paper that provides an insight into why the predictions were wrong and what we can do about this in future.

Space storms are a regular part of our sun’s activity. These so-called coronal mass ejections are a by-product of dramatic events called solar flares. They happen in active regions of the sun where a great amount of energy is built up in the form of a tangled magnetic field. This acts like a rubber band that has been twisted too far, snapping as it releases its stored energy.

The geomagnetic storms that occur when these ejections hit Earth can have dramatic consequences. Beautiful auroras in the night sky might be sights to behold, but equally GPS and telecommunication systems that rely on satellites can be disrupted, while radio black-outs can make it necessary to re-route air travel. In the worst scenarios, there can be strong surges of electrical currents that cannot be supported by national electric grids. This can lead to major power outages, such as the one experienced by Montreal and the Quebec region in Canada in March 1989.

Our findings

The progress of the January 2014 solar flare in the sun’s atmosphere was monitored by the Solar Dynamics Observatory, a NASA mission launched in 2010 dedicated to our hosting star. Our research team, which was lead by Dr Christian Möstl from the Austrian Academy of Sciences, analysed the regions surrounding the storm’s original location on the sun.

We found that the area surrounding it on one side was another intensely active region with a strong magnetic field, while the other side was occupied by a weak magnetic field called a “coronal hole”. The team concluded that the former strong field pushed the erupting storm away, channelling it into the weak field path and away from its original route.

The flare behind the storm

Once the storm was on its way out into space, it was then recorded by several space probes, including the Advanced Composition Explorer in Earth’s orbit and the Curiosity Rover on Mars. In particular, the Martian robot reported a decrease in the cosmic rays in its vicinity, the so-called Forbush effect. This phenomenon takes place when the magnetic field of the solar cloud deflects the energetic particles, originating from outer space, which constantly bombard a planet.

This data helped our team to build a model to reproduce the evolution of the solar cloud in space, and hence its arrival times, both at Earth and at the red planet. This should improve the models that scientists use for making real-time forecasts of space weather, such as those used by the UK MET Office space weather prediction centre, which opened in October 2014.

In short, we reached two conclusions. For accurate forecasts, we will have to monitor the surroundings of the point of origin of the solar activity in future, since these appear to strongly dictate how coronal mass ejections develop. This will ultimately tell us whether a coronal mass ejection will hit the Earth, at which angle and with what intensity.

Second, it is highly important that we continue to improve our models for describing how solar storms evolve once they leave the sun. This is what allows us to predict their arrival times at Earth, enabling national authorities to prepare for their consequences as accurately as possible. To do this, much more research is still required into areas such as the mechanisms underlying the ejection of solar storms, how they evolve in space and how they interact with a planet’s natural magnetic shields. That is a key challenge for my field in the coming months and years.

Five chemistry inventions that enabled the modern world

LCD screens are everywhere - even in art galleries. Dominic Alves/Flickr, CC BY-SA

Did you know that the discovery of a way to make ammonia was the single most important reason for the world’s population explosion from 1.6 billion in 1900 to 7 billion today? Or that polythene, the world’s most common plastic, was accidentally invented twice?

The chances are you didn’t, as chemistry tends to get overlooked compared to the other sciences. Not a single chemist made it into Science magazine’s Top 50 Science stars on Twitter. Chemistry news just don’t get the same coverage as the physics projects, even when the project was all about landing a chemistry lab on a comet.

So the Royal Society of Chemistry decided to look into what people really think of chemistry, chemists and chemicals. It turns out most people just don’t have a good idea of what it is chemists do, or how chemistry contributes to the modern world.

Chemistry hall of fame. Andy Brunning/Compound Interest, Author provided

This is a real shame, because the world as we know it wouldn’t exist without chemistry. Here’s my top five chemistry inventions that make the world you live in.

1. Penicillin

Not a cowshed, but a wartime penicillin production plant. Wellcome Images

There’s a good chance that penicillin has saved your life. Without it, a prick from a thorn or sore throat can easily turn fatal. Alexander Fleming generally gets the credit for penicillin when, in 1928, he famously observed how a mould growing on his petri dishes suppressed the growth of nearby bacteria. But, despite his best efforts, he failed to extract any usable penicillin. Fleming gave up and the story of penicillin took a 10-year hiatus. Until in 1939 it took Australian pharmacologist Howard Florey and his team of chemists to figure out a way of purifying penicillin in useable quantities.

No, I rather not say cheese / Howard Florey. wikimedia

However, as World War II was raging at the time, scientific equipment was in short supply. The team therefore cobbled together a totally functional penicillin production plant from from bath tubs, milk churns and book shelves. Not surprisingly the media were extremely excited about this new wonder drug, but Florey and his colleagues were rather shy of publicity. Instead Fleming took the limelight.

Full-scale production of penicillin took off in 1944 when the chemical engineer Margaret Hutchinson Rousseau took Florey’s Heath Robinson-esque design and converted it into a full-scale production plant.

2. The Haber-Bosch process

Ammonia revolutionised agriculture. eutrophication&hypoxia/Flickr, CC BY-SA

Nitrogen plays a critical role in the biochemistry of every living thing. It is also the most common gas in our atmosphere. But nitrogen gas doesn’t like reacting with very much, which means that plants and animals can’t extract it from the air. Consequently a major limiting factor in agriculture has been the availability of nitrogen.

In 1910, German chemists Fritz Haber and Carl Bosch changed all this when they combined atmospheric nitrogen and hydrogen into ammonia. This in turn can be used as crop fertiliser, eventually filtering up the food chain to us.

Today about 80% of the nitrogen in our bodies comes from the Haber-Bosch process, making this single chemical reaction probably the most important factor in the population explosion of the past 100 years.

3. Polythene – the accidental invention

They may be plastic but they are vintage and very valuable. Davidd/Flickr, CC BY-SA

Most common plastic objects, from water pipes to food packaging and hardhats, are forms of polythene. The 80m tonnes of the stuff that is made each year is the result of two accidental discoveries.

The first occurred in 1898 when German chemist Hans von Pechmann, while investigating something quite different, noticed a waxy substance at the bottom of his tubes. Along with his colleagues he investigated and discovered that it was made up of very long molecular chains which they termed polymethylene. The method they used to make their plastic wasn’t particularly practical, so much like the penicillin story, no progress was made for some considerable time.

Then in 1933 an entirely different method for making the plastic was discovered by chemists at, the now defunct chemical company, ICI. They were working on high-pressure reactions and noticed the same waxy substance as von Pechmann. At first they failed to reproduce the effect until they noticed that in the original reaction oxygen had leaked into the system. Two years later ICI had turned this serendipitous discovery into a practical method for producing the common plastic that’s almost certainly within easy reach of you now.

4. The Pill and the Mexican yam

Yum - Mexican yam! Katja Schulz/Flickr, CC BY-SA

In the 1930s physicians understood the potential for hormone-based therapies to treat cancers, menstrual disorders and of course, for contraception. But research and treatments were held back by massively time-consuming and inefficient methods for synthesising hormones. Back then progesterone cost the equivalent (in today’s prices) of $1,000 per gram while now the same amount can be bought for just a few dollars. Russel Marker, a professor of organic chemistry at Pennsylvania State University, slashed the costs of producing progesterone by discovering a simple shortcut in the synthetic pathway. He went scavenging for plants with progesterone-like molecules and stumbled upon a Mexican yam. From this root vegetable he isolated a compound that took one simple step to convert into progesterone for the first contraceptive pill.

5. The screen you are reading on

LCD screens rock Ian T. McFarland/Flickr, CC BY-SA

Incredibly, plans for a flat-screen colour displays date back to the late 1960s! When the British Ministry of Defence decided it wanted flat-screens to replace bulky and expensive cathode ray tubes in its military vehicles. It settled on an idea based on liquid crystals. It was already known that liquid crystal displays (LCDs) were possible, the problem was that they only really worked at high temperatures. So not much good unless you are sitting in an oven.

In 1970 the MoD commissioned George Gray at the University of Hull to work on a way to make LCDs function at more pleasant (and useful) temperatures. He did just that when he invented a molecule known as 5CB)changed this cause i really didn’t want to use wikipedia - OK?. By the late 1970s and early 1980s, 90% of the LCD devices in the world contained 5CB and you’ll still find it in the likes of cheap watches and calculator. Meanwhile derivates of 5CB make the phones, computers and TVs possible i added computer here - OK? .

Liquid crystals and LCDs

Online access to health records poses serious risks as well as benefits

Now that you've got access to your files, what will you - or someone else - do with them? files by Konstantin Sutyagin/shutterstock.com

Electronic medical records probably make healthcare safer and are now ubiquitous in UK general practice. They are now also potentially accessible by patients, something that while offering potential benefits may also fall foul of the law of unintended consequences.

All UK citizens have the right to see their medical records. Until this year that meant leafing through a paper copy or viewing a screen in your GP’s surgery. Few patients took the opportunity. But as of April 1, all general practices in England must offer adult patients online access to a brief record summary, and access to the full record as soon as possible. The vision is to provide all adults with online access to their full health and social care records by 2020.

Online access is more convenient, potentially empowers and enables patients to take better control of decisions around their healthcare, and may improve efficiency. There are also ethical arguments about autonomy and individual rights: the information in the medical record belongs to the patient, who has at least equal rights of access as any clinician or healthcare staff.

While there is some evidence that patients experience satisfaction and benefit from this sense of control, we do not know whether online access translates into better health or health care or whether it improves service efficiency. And, as my colleagues and I have argued in a recent British Journal of General Practice commentary, there is no research on potential harms, particularly related to privacy and confidentiality.

Potential pitfalls

One specific potential harm is coercion: where patients unwillingly give others access to their records from overt threats or force, or under the guise of helping a vulnerable relative. References to abuse or maltreatment in the medical record seen by household members may lead to escalation of the abuse, restrictions on access to healthcare for victims, or pressure or aggression directed at health staff in demands to change the record.

There is also the case of abused and neglected children, whose parents may have authorised access to their records. The 30% of women and 16% of men who experience domestic abuse in their lifetime and the 24% of children who experience abuse or neglect over childhood are at risk of further harm. Without the assurance of confidentiality, how can we expect patients to seek help from their GP for the full range of physical, emotional, sexual, and social problems that may affect them?

Medical records are supposed to be confidential - can we keep them that way if they’re accessible online? records by alexskopje/shutterstock.com

Equally important is the idea that the clinician, worried about coercion or information leakage within a household, may be inclined not to record anything deemed sensitive, such as early concerns about abuse or maltreatment. This would be contrary to recent guidance (from the General Medical Council, the National Institute for Health and Care Excellence, and the Royal College of General Practitioners respectively).

Workarounds

The Royal College of General Practitioners recommends that patients be informed about the dangers of sharing login details, that they are signposted to abuse support services, and that GPs are vigilant for coercion and prepared to withdraw online access where necessary. Of course the reality is much more complex, with coercion or information leakage occurring out of sight.

Technical solutions could exclude certain parts of the record from online access – restricting it to recent records or test results, for example. It might also be possible to filter out obviously sensitive elements while providing online access to the full medical record or for patients, hiding certain data in an electronic “walled garden”. As yet it’s not easy to do this, and it would require having to minimise the opportunity for human error.

Or GPs could systematically change the way they record sensitive information such as abuse and neglect. This would require training, and risks undermining the benefits of making a complete and cumulative health record available in the first place. Pilots of online record access, while reporting benefits, have not resolved potential harms to maltreated children, those reliant on carers or those in abusive relationships.

Online access to medical records is likely to have a transformative effect on what is stored in the record and how it is used, and on general practice itself. But in the absence of robust evidence about effectiveness and safety, we need to understand how it will be implemented and the potential harms and safeguards required – before the juggernaut of implementing the process reaches terminal velocity.

Oracle vs Google case threatens foundations of software design

Copyright keeps appearing where it's not wanted. Christopher Dombres, CC BY

The Java programming language, which has just turned 20 years old, provides developers with a means to write code that is independent of the hardware it runs on: “write once, run anywhere”.

But, ironically, while Java was intended to make programmers' lives easier, the court case between Oracle, Java’s owner, and Google over Google’s use of Java as the basis of its Android mobile operating system may make things considerably more difficult.

Google adopted Java for Android apps, using its own, rewritten version of the Java run-time environment (the Java virtual machine or VM) called Dalvik. The Oracle vs Google court case centres around the use of Java in Android, particularly in relation to Application Program Interface (API) calls.

An API is a standard set of interfaces that a developer can use to communicate with a useful piece of code – for example, to exchange input and output, access network connections, graphics hardware, hard disks, and so on. For developers, using an existing API means not having to reinvent the wheel by accessing ready-made code. For those creating APIs, making them publicly and freely accessible encourages developers to use them and create compatible software, which in turn makes it more attractive to end users.

For example, OpenGL and Microsoft’s DirectX are two APIs that provide a standardised interface for developers to access 3D graphics hardware, as used in videogames or modelling applications. Hardware manufacturers ensure their hardware is compatible with the API standard, the OpenGL Consortium and Microsoft update their APIs to ensure the latest hardware capabilities are addressed and games developers get a straightforward interface compatible with many different types of hardware, making it easier to create games.

Java RTE and Android ART Author provided

Fight for your right to API

Google designed Android so that Java developers could bring their code to Android by recreating (most of) the standard Java API calls used in the Java libraries and supported by the standard Java VM. The case revolves around whether doing this – by essentially re-creating the Java API rather than officially licensing it from Oracle – is a breach of copyright. If the case finds in favour of Oracle it will set a precedent that APIs are copyrightable, and so make developers lives a lot more legally complex.

To be clear, the case doesn’t revolve around any claim that Google reused actual code belonging to Oracle, but that the code it produced mimicked what Oracle’s Java run-time environment was capable of.

The initial finding came in May 2012, when a US court agreed with Google’s claim that using APIs them falls under fair use, and that Oracle’s copyright was not infringed. Then in May 2014, the US Federal Circuit reversed part of the ruling in favour of Oracle, especially related to the issue of copyright of an API. Now, at the US Supreme Court’s request, the White House has weighed in in Oracle’s favour.

Can you ‘own’ an API?

For most in the industry, a ruling that it’s possible to copyright an API would be a disaster. It would mean that many companies would have to pay extensive licence fees, and even face having to write their own APIs from scratch – even those needed to programmatically achieve only the simplest of things. If companies can prevent others from replicating their APIs through recourse to copyright law, then all third-party developers could be locked out. Also the actual call to the API and its functionality could be copyrighted too, so that the functionality would have to be different too, otherwise it would be a copy.

In the initial trial, District Judge William Alsup taught himself Java to learn the foundation of the language. He decided that to allow the copyrighting of Java’s APIs would allow the copyrighting of an improbably broad range of generic (and therefore uncopyrightable) functions, such as interacting with window menus and interface controls. The Obama administration’s intervention is to emphasise its belief that the case should be decided on whether Google had a right under fair use to use Oracle’s APIs.

It’s like the PC all over again

Something like this has happened before. When IBM produced its original PC in 1981 (the IBM 5150), a key aspect was access to the system calls provided by the PC BIOS, which booted the computer and managed basic hardware such as keyboard, monitor, floppy disk drive and so on. Without access to the BIOS it wasn’t possible to create software for the computer.

One firm, Compaq, decided to reverse-engineer the BIOS calls to create its own, compatible version – hence the term “IBM PC compatible” become standard language to describe a program that would run on an IBM model or any of the third-party hardware from other manufacturers that subsequently blossomed. IBM’s monopoly on the PC market was opened up, and the PC market exploded into what we see today – would this have happened had IBM been able to copyright its system calls?

So 20 years after the birth of Java, through the groundwork laid by its original creator, Sun Microsystems, Java has become one of the most popular programming languages in the world through being cross-platform and (mostly) open. But now it seems it ends in a trap. The wrong decision in this case could have a massive impact on the industry, where even using a button on a window could require some kind of licence – and licence fees. For software developers, it’s a horrible thought. Copyrighting APIs would lock many companies into complex agreements – and lock out many other developers from creating software for certain platforms.

For Google, there’s no way of extracting Java from Android now; its runaway success is bringing Google only a whole lot of problems. But as we go about building a world built on software, be assured that one way or another this ruling will have a massive effect on us all.