All posts by Paul Stradling

News

Tech insight: What is happening about the huge Facebook data leak?

Facebook has recently informed over 530 million users that, in 2019, they were exposed to a data breach. The criticism that followed has prompted some to ask: what is happening? 

What data breach? 

The details of 530 million Facebook users were reportedly exposed on a hacker’s forum. The data breach included phone numbers, Facebook IDs, names, and birthdates. However, it did not include financial information, health information or passwords.  

Hackers were able to gain access due to a bug in Facebook’s contact importer code, according to the company. Most of the data reportedly came from US users, but 18 million records were from UK users. 

Who is to blame for it? 

Facebook appears to place the blame on the ‘malicious actors’. It said the story is old news and not about a recent hack of its systems. 

After the data breach in 2019, Facebook said it made changes to the contact importer to prevent similar incidents. 

Criticism after the data breach 

With the Cambridge Analytica data still casting a shadow over Facebook, the re-surfacing of this data breach has not helped. In addition, Facebook’s apparent attitude towards it has drawn a lot of criticism. 

Although Facebook sees this as old data, it may still be used by cybercriminals. If a phone number is connected to email addresses, it can be used to obtain SMS codes to sign in. 

It is unclear whether Facebook has notified all users whose data had been stolen. There is no simple way for these users to tell if they have been affected by the data breach. People do not often change their details, so they could still be at risk. 

The platform’s dismissal of the data breach as ‘old news’ sparked an apparent culture of impunity. It also raised questions about its attitude to its users’ data. 

Facebook has also faced questions on whether it should be doing more, under GDPR, to respond to European regulators. Also, there are calls for Social media companies to be more open and improve security measures. 

Other criticism includes allowing privacy and security issues to continue, because of Facebook’s market dominance.  

Have you been victim? 

It is not always clear to see if you have been victim to a data breach. However, users can check if their details have been taken on HaveIBeenPwned. 

What does the data breach mean for your business? 

The size of this breach has place Facebook under the spotlight again. Many people, particularly European regulators, are calling for greater accountability. It is another blow to user trust and could fuel action in Washington.  

For users, it’s a case of not really knowing if their data has been stolen and sold on. They will feel powerless in their relationship with the social media giant as regards to their data privacy security.  Many feel that more pressure from organisations and tougher action from regulators may be the only way to force changes. 

You can find more tech insights on our news page. 

News

Tech news: Microsoft and LinkedIn’s new features to help UK jobseekers

People across the UK have lost jobs as a result of the pandemic. However, new features from Microsoft’s LinkedIn could help the country’s jobseekers. 

The challenge for jobseekers 

Many LinkedIn users may find themselves in the unemployment battlefield, trying to stand out from the rest. They may be capable of fulfilling job roles but may not have all the necessary qualifications and experience.  

As a result, LinkedIn is launching four new tools which it says will bring users’ professional stories to life. 

Jobseekers’ cover story 

The cover story is a feature that allows users to upload a video of themselves. According to LinkedIn, it will help members showcase their personality, communication skills and goals to employers. In addition, a cover story allows freelancers to talk about their services and attract new clients.  

Service page 

The second new tool allows users to create a dedicated ‘service page’ from their profile. LinkedIn says that this could give users more “reach” to its global community of nearly 740 million members.   

How creator mode will help jobseekers 

The new creator mode allows users to engage a community and build a following in a similar way to other social networks. For example, users can use hashtags to make their ‘featured’ and ‘activity’ sections more prominent. In addition to this, users can change their ‘connect’ button to ‘follow’. 

LinkedIn users can also see when other members are broadcasting live, as their background will show when streaming begins. This feature will help increase the visibility of broadcasters’ content.  

Career coach

Finally, LinkedIn’s Career Coach app helps students understand their goals, interests, and transferable skills. The app helps align a user’s profile with current job market trends, therefore increasing the chance of being noticed.  

The Career Coach also connects them to mentors and promotes skills, which increases their chance of successful job applications.  

Apprenticeship Connector 

Microsoft also introduced its Apprenticeship Connector, which is aimed at simplifying the apprenticeship process. It lists vacancies across Microsoft’s network of partners and customers, as part of a partnership with GetMyFirstJob. 

It is hoped the partnership will help young jobseekers, bridge the tech skills gap in the UK, and assist small businesses. 

What does this mean for jobseekers? 

These features may increase the relevance of the LinkedIn platform to employers and younger jobseekers and help the platform move more into content. 

They may also help to tie Microsoft more closely within other partnerships and opportunities related to tackling the tech skills gap. Importantly for members, they will help showcase their skills, work, and identity.  

You can read more tech news on our news page. 

News

Tech News : Liquid Cooling To Maintain Microsoft’s Data Centres

Huge demands on Microsoft’s data centre servers, partly driven by a surge in Microsoft Teams user numbers has led to the tech giant opting for liquid-immersion cooling.

The Challenge

Microsoft has recognised that it has now come up against the slowdown of Moore’s Law as transistor widths have shrunk to atomic scales and are reaching a physical limit, whilst the demand for faster computer processors for high performance applications such as AI has accelerated. This has meant that more electric power is now being put through the small processors used in Microsoft’s data centres, thereby increasing the heat they produce.  According to Microsoft, this means that air cooling is no longer enough to prevent the chips from malfunctioning. The demands of a huge increase in the numbers of Teams users during lockdown and the need to maintain sustainable and energy efficient data centres have also contributed to Microsoft’s decision to try liquid cooling.

Two-Phase Immersion Cooling

Since heat transfer in liquids is more efficient than air, Microsoft’s new system of two-phase immersion cooling involves immersing servers in tanks filled with an engineered fluid (from 3M) which has dielectric properties (i.e. it is an effective insulator), thereby allowing the servers to operate normally while fully immersed in the fluid. The liquid boils at 122 degrees Fahrenheit (90 degrees lower than the boiling point of water) and this boiling effect, generated by the work the servers are doing, takes the heat away from the computer processors whilst the low-temperature boil enables the servers to operate continuously at full power without risk of failure due to overheating.

The second phase of this two-phase process refers to the vapour rising from the tanks making contact with a cooled condenser in the tank lid, thereby changing it back to liquid that rains back onto the immersed servers, creating a closed-loop cooling system.

The Result

Microsoft says that the result of it becoming the “first cloud provider that is running two-phase immersion cooling in a production environment” at its datacentre in Quincy should be the ability of the company to:

– Continue the Moore’s Law trend at the datacentre level.

– Reduce power consumption.  For example, Microsoft’s trial of using liquid two-phase immersion for cooling AI showed reduced power consumption for any given server by 5 to 15 per cent.

– Increased flexibility for the efficient management of cloud resources.

– Improved efficiency and sustainability.

– The fact that the system uses a specially developed cooling fluid, and not water, gives Microsoft the ability to meet its commitment to replenish more water than it consumes by the end of the decade.

What Does This Mean For Your Business?

If your business uses Microsoft’s cloud-based services, and particularly those which involve AI and/or Teams, this switch to a new cooling technology at datacentre level should mean smooth running services with less risk of potentially costly outages and disruption going forward. For Microsoft, this may give it an advantage over cloud company competitors in terms of capacity, reliability, and sustainability credentials.

News

Tech Tip – Free Ways to Share Photos

We all take lots of photos with our smartphones, so here is a selection of some of the best free places to share (and back up) photos.

– Google Photos. Just having a Gmail account gives access to this service you can share photos with family, friends, or teammates, create albums, and grant access to those who want to share photos.

– Apple Photos. This sorts your photos, displays them in grid format for easier browsing, stores them to iCloud for ease of access from an iOS device or Mac, and automatically tags your photos based on location and content.

– iCloud. This allows photos to be shared as email attachments in Photos on iCloud or using an iCloud Link. To share photos with others via attachments from iCloud email, select the photos, tap Share > Email (attachments larger than 20 MB are replaced with an iCloud Link). See https://www.icloud.com/.

– Dropbox.  This popular cloud-based file-sharing, backup solution allows the creation of shared folders and shared links can be sent by email, social media, or instant message. See https://www.dropbox.com/.

– WeTransfer.  This is a fast, free, free file-sharing platform that requires no registration that allows the user to share photos across all devices provided they are compatible with web-based apps. Users can also choose to pay for a premium plan for password protection, 1TB of storage, and an increased transfer limit (to 20 MB). See https://wetransfer.com/.

– Flickr. This photo-sharing platform is user-friendly and has easy-to-use menus, and photo editing tools. Flickr also offers other features like auto-backups, an ad-free experience, unlimited storage, and photo stats. See https://www.flickr.com/.

– AirDrop.  This platform allows photos to be shared/sent between Apple devices (iPhone, iPad, or Mac).  The service doesn’t require a special account and sharing is particularly easy if both the sender and recipient are on a Wi-Fi network, and both have AirDrop and Bluetooth enabled.

– Instagram. Yes, it’s a social media app but if you often share photos, and your intended recipients already follow you, it’s a good free option.  It also has photo editing options. See https://www.instagram.com/.

– Cluster.  This free, private group photo sharing app can be accessed via a web browser or mobile app, users can make as many albums as they like, and can invite and connect with others. See https://cluster.co/.

News

Featured Article : Risks or Benefits of Charging Devices Overnight?

Many of us charge phones and laptops overnight but is this good for the battery and is it potentially dangerous, and how can we safely get the most from our device batteries?

Batteries

Smartphone and laptop batteries are Lithium-Ion (Li-Ion). These batteries have high energy density so they can be made small, while their rate of self-discharge is much lower than alternatives (like Ni-Cad for example) which means less charging, they have a high cell voltage, they don’t require priming (for a first charge), and there’s little or no maintenance required.  All these characteristics make them ideal as the power component in our essential, portable electric items.

That said, lithium batteries contain a flammable electrolyte which could be risky in some circumstances (remember the famous Samsung Galaxy Note 7 fires back in 2017?), they need protection (circuitry and special chips) to prevent them from being over-charged and discharged too far, they age (whether in use or not) so require replacing, and they are relatively expensive.

Likes and Dislikes

Knowing how to protect and get the best from the battery in your phone or laptop requires knowing a few basic conditions that batteries like and dislike.  For example:

Your battery generally likes:

– Partial charges that keep the battery between 20 and 80 percent.  This is because a battery degrades at its fastest rate if it is regularly charged past 80 per cent or when it drops below 20 percent. Devices seem to operate best when batteries are around the 50 per cent charge mark.

Your battery generally dislikes:

– Extremes.  This can be extremes of temperature below 32 Fahrenheit (0 Celsius) and above 158 Fahrenheit (70 Celsius) which can degrade the battery, let alone having an adverse effect on the device that the battery may be inside at the time.  This means avoiding leaving phones in warm sunlight (e.g. while sunbathing or sitting outdoors, or leaving the phone in a hot or cold car, perhaps overnight). Avoid the practice of putting phone batteries in fridges or freezers to ‘revive’ them.  Although there are positive accounts of this, it can result in degrading the battery. Charging devices in extreme temperature environments should also be avoided – room temperature is best.

– Being kept at 100 percent charge for long periods of time e.g., if charging at night.  This is when a battery can degrade the fastest.

– Apps being used while your device is charging. Using apps on your phone, for example, while the phone is still connected to the charger can heat and damage the battery and damage the device.

Overnight Charging

Overnight charging of phones and laptops frequently raises questions about efficiency, and safety.

Efficiency

Overnight is often a very convenient time to charge a phone or laptop but, since it only takes around an hour to charge a device, leaving it connected for 6 or 7 hours is not efficient. This is because phone or laptop batteries degrade fastest if left at 100 per cent for long periods of time (i.e. overnight), and a small ‘trickle charge’ is produced to compensate for any energy lost by the device.  This means that the battery is being unnecessarily used/over-used and switching to the mains power via the cable (when the battery is fully charged), could mean unnecessarily using electricity.

Safety

Although there are plenty of horror stories of phones catching fire while charging overnight, many of these appear to be where a phone has been left in a situation where there has been a lack of airflow and where it has been overheated (e.g. by being left under pillows or clothes). Generally, although not good for devices, overnight charging is relatively safe. Tips for making overnight charging as safe as possible include:

– Placing the device on protective/non-flammable surface, e.g. on a plate/saucer rather than on or under books, clothes, or on sofas.

– If possible and practical, take a phone out of the case when charging overnight.

– If you wake up in the night, unplug the devices to prevent constant trickle-charging or use a smart plug that’s on a schedule to turn off at a certain time when you’re sure the battery will have been charged.

Cables

Using high quality (preferably genuine and device compatible) chargers and cables which have correct safety marks (CE safety mark and output voltage that’s compatible with the device) can reduce the risk of fire and/or damage to the device and battery.

Replacement Batteries

Having a replacement battery fitted by a professional, as is often necessary with many new device models, is another way to avoid operational and safety problems.

Other Ways To Treat Device Batteries Well

– Other ways to maximise battery life, device efficiency and maintain safety include:

– Turn off unnecessary services on the device and use battery savers (often suggested by an on-screen prompt) to make the most of each charge.

– If a laptop must be left on overnight, remove the battery and use the adapter to power the laptop. This will put less of a burden on the battery by sending power directly to the laptop.

– Fully charge laptop batteries at least once a month to help the laptop to calibrate its estimator, i.e. to help it to accurately know how long the battery will last.

What Does This Mean For Your Business?

Mobile devices such as smartphones and laptops are now essential business tools. Although they tend to be regularly replaced, some knowledge of how batteries (and devices) perform best and getting into good habits as regards battery care can prevent batteries failing at important times, can improve safety, reduce costs (replacement batteries and electricity), and extend their life. Mobile and remote working has become essential for many businesses over the last year and with a surge in demand for laptops and phones fuelled by the pandemic, it is more important than ever that knowledge of how to maintain the batteries and devices is made available to improve efficiency and to keep remote workers safe as well as productive.

News

Tech Insight – The Global Microchip Shortage

With the world facing a considerable semiconductor microchip shortage, we take a look at the causes and effects of the shortage plus some potential solutions.

Why Is This Important?

Microchips are now included in virtually everything from watches to white goods and crucially in larger, high demand, big industry items such as cars.  Many products have more than one chip and as the IoT market expands, so does demand for more microchips.

Why The Global Shortage?

The global shortage of semiconductor microchips has been caused by a ‘perfect storm’ of many factors.  These include:

– Car companies slimming down manufacturing following a 50 percent slum in car sales, due to the COVID-19 pandemic.

– Microchip producers switching to smartphone, laptop, and tablet chips in response to a surge in demand due to remote working because of the pandemic, thereby disrupting chip markets.

– Manufacturers of semiconductor microchips, which require huge investment in plants over many years, tend to operate with low stock levels to minimise costs. The surge in demand for chips (particularly for cars) following the first lockdowns therefore meant there were no backup supplies, chip manufacturers would need time to adapt to switch back to car chips, and manufacturers could not meet demand.

– With most chips being manufactured in Taiwan, the US trade war with China during the Trump administration caused supply problems due to sanctions (e.g. US chip firm Xilinx having to stop supplying to China, and Huawei being put on a trade blacklist).

– Under-investment in 8-inch chip manufacturing plants owned by Asian companies. Also, most of the production in Asia is concentrated into mainly the Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Co Ltd (TSMC) and Samsung, who manufacture on behalf of hundreds of other different chip companies.

– Weather and other events disrupting supply and worsening the global shortage of semiconductor microchip (e.g. droughts in Taiwan as water is needed in chip production), winter storms in February shutting-down the NXP semiconductor plant in Texas, and a fire at the AKM semiconductor plant in Nobeoka, Miyazaki, Japan last October 20. The AKM factory (owned by Renesas Electronics Corp), for example, accounts for a massive 30 per cent of the global market for the microcontroller units used in cars.

The Impact

Examples of some of the main impacts caused by the global shortage are:

– Massive disruption, damage to profits, and potential job losses in the car industry and in car supply chain businesses.  For example, Ford, Toyota, and VW are partially mothballing factories. Car manufacturers are also producing fewer of their less profitable vehicles.

– Phone manufacturers delaying model releases (e.g. Samsung considering delaying the launch of the latest Galaxy Note).  This, of course, will affect the phone company’s profits and competitiveness and will have a knock-on effect towards phone retail businesses.

– Games console shortages (also compounded by an increase in demand over lockdown).  For example, Microsoft has been facing production challenges with Xbox Series X/S. This may have knock-on effects for games console retailers.

– Knock-on effects into the development of 5G networks (e.g. in the UK and US).

Possible Solutions

The main solution to tackling the global shortage has been for countries implementing the costly and time-consuming measures of setting up their own semiconductor microchip factories to try and guarantee at least some increased level of supply, and to reduce reliance upon countries between whom there may be a difficult relationship. For example, U.S. President Joe Biden is looking for $37 billion for legislation to boost chip manufacturing in the U.S. with a view to setting up four new factories in Arizona and Texas. Also, US sanctions have forced China to start investing heavily in its local tech companies such as Zhaoxin, Huawei, and SMIC to help deal with the shortage.

These developments will take time, and with the majority of 2021’s output already sold, it is anticipated that the shortage and many of its effects may carry on for another year.

What Does This Mean For Your Business?

For any businesses that require semiconductor microchips for manufacturing, or for business that supply and sell goods and devices that include these chips, the near future may hold uncertainty and potentially damaging disruption and shortages which could impact upon operational decision-making, hit profits, and have a negative impact across supply chains.

News

Tech News : New Amazon AI Tool Monitors Your Business KPIs

In a move to provide more business intelligence, Amazon is launching a new tool that monitors key performance indicators (KPIs) to detect ‘anomalies’ so it can alert the business to potential problems.

Lookout For Metrics

‘Lookout For Metrics’ is the name of the new service from Amazon Web Services (AWS) which uses machine learning for business analytics to monitor KPI’s such as web page views, mobile app downloads, numbers of active users, and income to detect any anomalies and to inform the business/organisation about those anomalies.

Anomalies

The kinds of anomalies / outliers from the norm in business and operational data that AWS is referring to are spikes, dips, and other unusual patterns detected within the analytics that are outside of normal bounds across business functions.

Automated Alerts

Amazon says that that the Lookout for Metrics tool can be easily connected with event and notification services such as Amazon Simple Notification Service and AWS Lambda to created automated and customised alerts and actions when anomalies are detected, such as filing a trouble ticket.

Why?

AWS says that this kind of monitoring can help businesses to better understand customer issues (e.g. churn rates) and take action to improve customer experiences, optimise digital ad-campaigns and prevent overspends, and take action to optimise user engagement by understanding changes in metrics such as new users, app installs, in-app purchases, or retention rates.  The Lookout For Metrics Tool can, therefore, give businesses critical insights to help them make better decisions and create a more productive and efficient organisation, giving them another way to analyse how to keep up with their competitors, and grow revenues. 

AWS also points out that using this tool is a faster and more accurate way than traditional methods for anomaly detection, thereby minimising damage by saving time in finding the root cause of anomalies.  Also, the tool gives businesses a prioritised list of issues, ranked by severity, so that any business can clearly see which issues need immediate attention and which can wait.

Easy To Set Up

Lookout For Metrics requires no specialist machine learning training to start using it and Amazon says that it “connects seamlessly” to popular AWS databases and has pre-built connectors to third-party SaaS applications, thereby enabling the monitoring of metrics and anomaly detection to begin with just a few clicks.

Type of Metrics

The types of popular datasets that Lookout For Metrics can be connected to include Amazon S3, Amazon Redshift, Amazon Relational Database Service (RDS), and third-party SaaS applications, such as Salesforce, ServiceNow, Zendesk, and Marketo.

What Does This Mean For Your Business?

Having access to accurate and timely business intelligence can help businesses to optimise their marketing, make better decisions, and make a business more competitive. Being able to easily set up an automated tool that’s compatible with popular datasets makes this a convenient and fast way for businesses to get a better understanding of where faults lie and where value-adding improvements can be made, and which areas to tackle first. This gives many businesses access to the kind of expert insights that would be more difficult, time consuming and costly to obtain by traditional methods.  For AWS, this provides a way to show themselves as a provider of Business Intelligence (BI) as well as many other services.

News

Android Stack Scanner Can Organise Your Documents

Google is launching its ‘Stack’ app for Android, an AI-based scanner that also names and categorises the documents it scans.

The Technology

The Stack app is a result of collaborative work between Area 120, Google’s in-house incubator and the DocAI team in Google Cloud, and the technologies from Google’s acquisition of the education start up ‘Socratic’.

How It Works

When users take a photo of a document, the Stack app scans it, automatically names it, and suggests the right category or “stack,” to store it in.

Stack is also able to identify important information in documents (e.g. the “due date” or “total amount due”) and pull that out to make the document easier to find and access, plus users can search through the full text of documents (not just the title) to quickly find what is needed.

When it comes to (secure) storage, Stack uses advanced security and sign-in technology to protect the documents in the app and a face or fingerprint scan can be added as an extra layer to unlock the app.  Copies of documents can also be automatically saved to Google Drive which means that they are still accessible should a user decide to stop using Stack.

Benefits

The benefits of using Stack are that it provides a fast, easy, handy, intelligent, and searchable way to organise all important work documents such as invoices and receipts. The fact that important details in the document (e.g. due date) can be recognised by the app can make it easier to pay bills on time and can provide different (fast) ways to search for documents.  Also, the app’s ability to categorise and store a document accordingly in effect provides an instant time and space-saving filing system that is also secure and always available from anywhere using a smartphone.

Just The U.S. For Now

Unfortunately, Stack is only currently available in the U.S. via Google Play Store.

What Does This Mean For Your Business?

When Stack does become available in the UK, this could be a very useful digital filing system for businesses which is fully portable (a phone app), searchable, secure, and provides a backup on Google Drive if the user decides to stop using Stack at any point.  This app sounds like a handy way to finally organise any piles of paper and any disparate pdfs into one central, easily accessible system.  For Google, this has been a productive way to use technology that it gained through an acquisition to add value to its services, and it is another good example of how AI can be put to practical use to tackle real-life daily challenges. There are many other mobile scanner apps available (Adobe Scan, Clear Scanner, Office Lens, Tiny Scanner), but the advantages of this one are the recognising/categorising and searching elements provided by AI plus the fact that it’s from Google and backs up to Google Drive for futureproofing.

News

Tech Tip – How To Speed Up Your Phone Charging

If you are finding that your phone is getting slow at charging, here are some of the possible causes and solutions:

– Incompatible or faulty accessories, such as power brick, USB cable, or charging pad/mat (for wireless charging). Choosing a charger or brick with higher amperage e.g., a power brick with 2 to 3 amps could help speed up charging, as could making sure that you are using an authentic charging (USB) cable that is in good condition. Using a different USB cable and power adapter could be a good first try at solving the problem.

– Wireless charging slowing things down. Wireless charging tends to be slower than cable charging, so consider switching back to traditional adapter & USB cable charging (bearing in mind the point made above).

– Damage to or dirt in the charger port on the phone (where the cable plugs in). If there’s dirt, use a wooden toothpick or a soft brush to clean it out. If it is broken, a technician, perhaps recommended by your local phone shop can fix it for you.

– Background apps using power. To stop this happening (Android), use Settings > Battery> Battery Usage to find the apps and disable their background battery usage. Select the app and tap Background restriction. For iPhones or iPads, go to Settings > Battery and tap Show Activity.

– An old or defective battery. To check an iPhone or iPad’s battery capacity, use Settings > Battery > Battery Health and if the Maximum Capacity is 80 per cent or lower, this may be a sign that the battery needs replacing.

– Using the phone while charging. This should be avoided because it causes the phone to charge more slowly, raises battery temperature, and increases the chances of fraying the charging cable.

News

Featured Article : Art, Cars, Carbon & Crazy Numbers

With news of a booming NFT market and the acceptance of Bitcoin as payment for Tesla cars, we look at the environmental impact of these and how the technology needs to be improved to be made more sustainable.

Robot Painting Collaboration

This week there was news that an artwork co-created by a robot called Sophia fetched $7,000,000 dollars. The artwork, which consisted of a 12-second MP4 file showing how the work evolved and a ‘self-portrait’ painted with a robot arm, was not just an example of the advancements of robotics and AI, or the incredible collaboration between a human and a robot to create an artwork but is also an example of how the market for ‘NFT’ art is growing.

NFT

Blockchain is at the incorruptible ledger, a bit like a secure spreadsheet that no-one can alter, that is the technology that powers cryptocurrencies like Ethereum or Bitcoin.  A non-fungible token (NFT) is the term for any unit of data on that blockchain / digital ledger. A unit could be any digital file such as digital artwork files, audio, videos, and more.  Each NFT represents a unique, non-interchangeable, exclusive digital item/asset, and is recorded in the blockchain ‘ledger’ as a cryptographic “hash”.

NFT Artwork

The market for NFT artworks is growing and more examples of digital NFT artworks fetching high prices are making the news more often as they break new boundaries. For example, this month, an artist known as Beeple sold a photo collage artwork (of 5000 images) at Christies called ‘Everydays — The First 5000 Days’, for a staggering $70 million. This makes it the third most expensive sale ever of a living artist, only beaten by the price fetched for works by David Hockney and Jeff Koons.

Another Price – Carbon

Many environmental and tech commentators are, however, concerned about the environmental impact of transactions involving the use of Blockchain and the cryptocurrencies that it powers. 

Mining

Much of the concern focuses on how energy-hungry the process of adding data to the blockchain, known as ‘mining ’, is. Crypto mining, uses software to explore millions of cryptographic checksums to find one that has the right number combination to “mint” a transaction and to try computations on the next block to be added to the blockchain.  Unfortunately, solving this complex puzzle involves using a large amount of electricity, the production of which produces carbon dioxide. The obvious conclusion for some tech and art commentators is, therefore, that NFTs may be making a negative contribution to climate change.

Debate

Turkish artist Memo Akten recently posted details online of “The Unreasonable Ecological Cost of #CryptoArt”.  Akten highlighted how “a single Ethereum (ETH) transaction is estimated to have a footprint on average of around 35 kWh. This in itself, is ludicrously high. To put that into perspective, this is roughly equivalent to an EU resident’s electric power consumption for 4 days.”  

The artist also compared how a single ETH transaction mouse click can set off a chain reaction to mining farms that ultimately delivers a footprint of 35 kWh for an ‘average’ transaction, and emissions of close to 20 KgCO2.  For perspective, the artist compares the impact of this one single mouse click to an average email being estimated to have a footprint of a few grams of CO2 or watching one whole hour of Netflix being estimated at resulting in the production of around 36 grams CO2.

Akten argues that just one NFT can involve many transactions including minting, bidding, cancelling, sales, and transfer of ownership which creates a footprint of a single NFT of hundreds of kWh, and hundreds of KgCO2 emissions.  Akten says that a single NFT footprint works out to be the “equivalent to an EU resident’s total electric power consumption for more than a month, with emissions equivalent to driving for 1000Km, or flying for 2 hours.”

Other commentators, such as Kelsie Nabben, a researcher at the RMIT University Blockchain Innovation Hub, believe that NFTs may be no more environmentally damaging than other ways of trading art e.g., transporting them around the world and storing them in temperature-controlled environments, all of which uses a lot or energy.

More Efficient In Time

Many agree, however that NFT technology is still relatively new and that it could be made more energy efficient as it advances, thereby reducing its environmental cost.

Buying Tesla In Bitcoins Cancels Environmental Benefits

The recent announcement that Tesla Inc customers can now buy its electric vehicles with Bitcoin, and how this could be a big step forward for the cryptocurrency’s use in commerce has been met by counter-argument that focuses on the potential environmental cost.  A medium.com article pointed to how, ironically, the cost of buying an energy-saving, environmentally friendly electric-powered Tesla car in Bitcoins could equate to cancelling one third of the CO2 savings for its whole lifetime.

Cambridge Bitcoin Energy Research

NFTs and buying Tesla vehicles with Bitcoins essentially highlight how the whole interaction between blockchain and cryptocurrencies has some way to go to reduce its energy-consumption.  Recent figures from Cambridge Researchers recently highlighted how power-hungry “mining” for Bitcoin consumes 21.36 terawatt-hours (TWh) a year meaning that if Bitcoin were a country, its energy (electricity) consumption it would be ranked above Argentina and the energy could power all the kettles in the UK for 27 years. Although this sounds shocking when framed this way, it should be remembered that the amount of electricity consumed each year by home devices in the US alone that are always-on but not active could power the entire Bitcoin network for a year, thereby highlighting other important areas for improvement in terms of widespread environmental impact.

Looking Ahead

There has been an explosive rise in NFTs and in only three months, the combined market cap of major NFT projects has increased by a massive 1,785 per cent. Although this has created booming NFT, high valuations of NFT-related tokens and the accompanying new market and investment opportunities, the environmental cost appears to be growing at the same time.

Calls for a carbon tax on cryptocurrencies to help balance out some of the negative consumption, carbon offsetting, and offering prizes (Elon Musk) for new Carbon Capture Systems are all very well but may not be tackling the problem itself. Developing a more energy-efficient and environmentally sustainable way of managing how crypto-currencies work and how they interact with Blockchain may be the way forward in solving some of the environmental problems created by the increased use of cryptocurrencies and the growth of the NFT market. This could involve several steps such as using different, low-energy consensus algorithms, building more energy-efficient blockchains and creating more sustainable mining solutions, and is something that must be addressed soon in order to ensure that Blockchain technology and cryptocurrencies, which have many benefits, can grow in a way whereby those benefits aren’t outweighed by the environmental cost.