Category Archives: Technology

Technology based posts

All your personal info belongs to…some web site or other?

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This is an interesting little article about a new product from Mozilla Labs for Firefox – it allows you to grab tour personal contact data from various web services and sources, and then keep it in a repository from where you can decide exactly what to make available to OTHER web services and sites.   The data is stored and indexed locally – as @timoreilly tweeted – “I like the idea of a smarter client-side address book, so my social data doesn’t end up belonging to someone else. ”

And so do I.

I have a large contact list in Outlook on my PC which definitely goes nowhere near any online web service.  In a similar way, 95% of people I deal with on Facebook I deal with purely on Facebook; same with twitter and any Internet Forums I belong to.  If  Twitter and Facebook disappeared overnight, I’d lose access to quite a few contacts I have in those two ‘depositories’ of data, but some folks on there that I would DEFINITELY miss in the event of Social Networking meltdown I’ve got alternative means of contact for – usually e-mail addresses, occasionally phone numbers.  As for e-mail, I tend to use good old fashioned ‘Mail Client’ software – Outlook again, I’m afraid! – and rarely use web mail.

I guess the bottom line is that I don’t really trust any server outside of my direct control when it comes to storing my personal data.  I wouldn’t feel 100% safe with having all of my contacts lists on the servers of someone like Microsoft or Google for a couple of reasons:

  • Your access to your contacts is gone if they have connectivity issues or a server goes.
  • Your contacts are open to exploitation from hackers / spammers.
  • Your contacts contribute to the ‘database of intentions’ – if your contacts have accounts with people like Google or Amazon using the email address in your list, it’s potentially possible for their interests to be used to target ‘social advertising’ at you when you use your email address to access a site.

This is without starting to worry about the issues surrounding storing my content on other people’s servers.  No, I’m much happier to keep my central list of contacts on my PC.  I can back it up, it’s always there when I have access to my PC, if I want to put it on another machine it’s just a case of copying it over.

The Mozilla application looks useful in terms of getting backups of such data – which is great – but I’m still going to be terribly inefficient and keep my contacts where I know what’s happening to ’em!

New Media, Old Manners

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This post is based on some comments I made on another blog recently – dealing with the question of whether using Social media turns us in to rude bumpkins.  Whilst it’s true that the decision to participate or not in all this Tweeting and Facebooking is in our own hands, the amount of general rudeness that this sort of all pervasive social media generates is astonishing.  I appreciate that I come from an older generation who had very different ideas of what behaviours are acceptable, so I hope you’ll pardon me if I appear to be something of a dinosaur!

Here are a  couple of ‘old style’ rules of thumb that I was taught years ago about the etiquette of using technology that I still use today.

  • If you have a visitor, hold the phone calls.  If a call gets through, ask briefly if it’s important, as you have a guest.  Then if it proves not to be important, arrange to call the caller back later.  If you’re responsible for your own calls, let an answering machine take it. 
  • If you are in a conversation on the phone, don’t multi-task and email at the same time.  No matter how good you think you are at multi-tasking, the person on the other end of the phone will know you’re doing something else.
  • If someone asks you for the contact details of a third party, then contact the third party first and ask, or mail that person on behalf of the person asking with THEIR details.  Don’t give the personal details of someone else away without asking.

Social Media users often breach the equivalents of these old style social guidelines.  We Tweet when talking to people, share personal information like locations and photographs of third parties with people who may be total strangers.  We forget that the people we’re WITH are more important than the often relatively anonymous folks in our extended electronic network.  I have to say that I find it strange to be sitting in the pub with people and have half the group tweeting or Facebooking – it’s a habit that I’ve started acquiring a little as well.  I find it equally weird to be in courses or seminars – or presentations – and find people Tweeting – even if they’re encouraged to do so!  I just find it hard to believe that people can be paying attention to what’s being said whilst using social media.

I have to wonder how much of the use of Social Media by some people is akin to the mobile phone using buffoon portrayed by comedia Dom Jolly in which a guy is bustling along holding a gigantic mobile phone and is yelling in to it – it’s an ego-prop rather than a communications tool. 

Do you REALLY need the world and their dog to know you’re arriving at your hotel?  Or is it all about ego?

Facebook and the panic button….

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Since the recent case in which a teenage girl was groomed and murdered by a paedophile via the Facebook site, there has been a lot of pressure from the UK Government for Facebook to put a ‘Panic Button’ style link on the site – a move supported by the CEOP organisation.  Facebook have commented that they have no objection in principle to making it easier to report abuse on the site, but that they feel that the CEOP supported option is not necessarily the best way.

Facebook are far from perfect in the way that they treat their users; I think all of us who use the site would have our own grumbles about privacy and the attitude of Facebook as a whole towards individual users now that they’ve got big.  But to be honest I think I would rather central Government stayed out of issues like this – especially New Labour, who seem to have spent the last decade dismantling our civil liberties bit by bit.  For a previous broader comment on this issue, I direct you to this item from a year ago, in which author Phillip Pullman commented on the behaviour of New Labour.

Since then we’ve had the Digital Economy Bill – even without the Lib Dem Peers’ Amendments it was a pretty poor piece of legislation.  With the amendments it offers a wonderful means of stifling debate by simply shutting down access to any site that breaches copyright.  Under the Bill, as it stands, and if it were strictly applied, YouTube could be blocked to UK ISPs because of material that breaches copyright. 

Part of the problem with New Labour is their amazing ability to put together piss-poor legislation on a ‘knee jerk’ basis.  A lone gun nut leads to a total handgun ban – which doesn’t affect criminals as they tend to disobey the law anyway.   Despite massive increases in the legislation aimed at child protection, the very basic laws that were there all along fail to be implemented and children keep getting killed.  And there are many more examples.  One interpretation of this repeated series of cock-ups is that they’re just incompetent; my own interpretation is that New Labour are just incredibly keen on reducing our civil liberties as much as they can to have a nicely compliant and obedient citizenry.

The issue for me here is not just the Facebook reporting mechanism; I’m afraid I regard that as something of a ‘thin end of the wedge’, by which Government could influence and impact the policies of web sites not even based in Britain.  It’s not far from that sort of thing to the  censorship policies adopted by China and, more recently, but to a lesser degree, Australia.  Protesting about this sort of Government activity, which initially starts with child protection, is a little bit like trying to answer the question ‘Have you stopped beating your wife?’ in a way that doesn’t make you guilty.  But given this Governments record on civil liberties I’m afraid I do not and cannot trust them. 

As  Rousseau said “Free people, remember this maxim: we may acquire liberty, but it is never recovered if it is once lost. ”

And we’re losing it bit by bit.

I want to use Ubuntu on a laptop…but….

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Many, many moons ago, and I mean in the last century, I had a version of Linux running on one of my PCs, and lo, it was good.  If you liked command lines and stuff like that, as the PC concerned wasn’t really up to running X-Windows and such.  But hey, not a problem; I was only wanting to run it as a development web server and after a little faffing around I had it neatly wired to my router and that was that.

Somewhere in the early 21st Century – OK, 2004 – we bit the bullet and went Wifi here at The Towers.  Once we had the Windows machines running on that network, I started toying with WiFi for the Linux boxes but couldn’t find a distro that did it ‘out of the box’.  As an experiment I did try and get whatever version of Ubuntu was kicking around in about 2006 working with a USB WiFi Dongle, but once I got on to the part of the instructions that involved downloading all sorts of arcane bits of software from around the Internet, then compiling wrappers, installing Windows drivers on Linux machines and all sorts of other tomfoolery I decided to quit.  Oh, and after I’d spent a couple of evenings at it with no results.  

The general impression I got from people ‘in the know’ was that:

  1. It is easy if you follow the instructions.
  2. Linux is OK – it’s my WiFi dongle that was wrong.
  3. Future versions of Ubuntu will deal with these dongles.

Well, so be it.  But at the time I didn’t find (1) easy, (2) seemed a bit dumb when the dongle worked happily on 3 versions of Windows and (3) – well, I can be patient.

In 2008 my then laptop had a couple of accidents involving a cup of tea and a crashed hard disc, and it was replaced with a nice new machine, and today I decided that the old laptop should be dug out and Linuxed – and because I’ve had previous experience with Ubuntu, I decided to grab a CD Image of Ubuntu and re-partition and re-format the hard disc of the laptop with Ubuntu 9.10.  The installation went fine – I soon had a laptop running Ubuntu, and was pleased to see that it automatically detected my USB WiFi dongle AND also spotted a couple of local WiFi networks….shame neither of them were mine.

I attempted to attach to my home network directly by specifying the name; I selected the correct security protocol and entered the key; nothing.  Nada.  Not a peep.  Just kept asking me for my security key settings again.  In other words, it wasn’t connecting to my home network.  Which is a shame, because we have XP machines, Vista machines, Windows NT, Windows ME, a Blackberry and a Wii that all happily connect to the WiFi network at Pritchard Towers. 

I guess I’ll take another look at it soon; using a wired connection isn’t really on due to where the router is in the house, so WiFi is necessary.  Fortunately I’m not reliant on this machine as my main PC around the house, but it’s a sad repetition of the last time I decided to install a Linux on one of my machines to use as a ‘Client’ Operating System rather than as a server.  It doesn’t bloody work!  I appreciate that the Linux Fanbois will tell me all sorts of things I can do to make it work, but to be honest that misses the point.  Take a look at teh graph below (from Wikipedia)

Linux provides a little over 1% of the total number of Client Web Browsers detected by web sites.  The fun and games I’m having probably explains why.  For all the hype and fuss about Linux finally coming of age as a desktop replacement for Windows, it is just not going to happen as long as you can’t get the damn thing to connect to a bog standard WiFi network out of the box.

Come on fellows, I want to play; meet me half way.

It’s for our own good….

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And I’m sure that Twitter will not be doing anything else – at least not yet – with their code when they’re making the Twittersphere safe for us all to Tweet in by screening links.  The logic of the Twitter people is sound; by vetting links they can reduce or totally remove the number of phishing and malware links that are made available to Twitter users.  They’re effectively developing a Twitter ‘Killbot’. One thing that has become clearer over recent years with the explosion of Social Network sites like Twitter and Facebook is that no matter what you say to people, and how often you say it, folks will still click links from total strangers and get themselves in to trouble.  Despite warnings, they’ll hand over user names and passwords because they’re asked for them.  And even savvy Net users are occasionally caught out by well crafted ‘targetted’ phishing scams.

 So checking and validating links – including those in DMs – is at first glance a good idea.  It only takes a few people replying to spam or filling in details on phishing sites to keep the problem going, and as education seems to be woefully inadequate at changing people’s behaviour on these issues; let’s face it, after nearly 20 years of widespread Internet use by the general public, the message about not replying to spam and not buying from spammers  has still not penetrated a good many thick skulls.

However – and it’s a big however – the technology that stops dodgy links can also be used to stop any Tweets, simply by tweaking the code.  There is a line that is crossed when you start using automated filtration techniques on any online platform.  It’s obvious that on fast growing, fast moving systems like Twitter it’s going to be impossible to have human beings realistically monitoring traffic for malware of any sort, and it’s inevitable that some form of automated techniques will be in use.  But once that line’s crossed, it’s important that we don’t forget that the technology that stops these links can also be used to stop anything else that ‘the Creators’ don’t wish to be on the system.

A wee while ago I wrote this item, in which I suggested that so much of the responsibility for ongoing phishing attacks on Twitter falls on folks who’re clicking those links; whilst spammers and phishers get bites, they carry on trying.  So, if you ARE still falling for these phishing scams – get wise and learn how to spot them!

One final observation – the code that can spot a malware link can also spot keywords.  And when you can spot keywords you can start targeting adverts.  And combined with Twitters newly activated Geolocation service, we might soon see how Twitter expects to make money from location and content targeted advertising.

Your email address CAN be harvested from Facebook…a heads up!

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Or…yet another reason to watch who you befriend….

Facebook attempts to be what’s known in the online world as a ‘Closed Garden’ – interactions with the rest of the Internet are restricted somewhat to make the user experience better…or to keep you in the loving arms of Facebook, depending on how cynical you are.  One of the tools in this process is the Facebook API – a set of programming tools that Facebook produce to make it possible for programmers to write software that works within the Facebook framework.  Indeed, Facebook get very peeved if you try automating any aspect of the site’s behaviour without using the API.

One thing that the API enforces is the privacy controls; and one thing that you cannot get through the API is an email address.  Which is cool – it prevents less scrupulous people who’ve written games and such from harvesting email addresses from their users to use for other purposes.  It also ensures that all mass communications are done through Facebook.

Of course, if you’re determined enough you could go to every Friend’s profile page and copy the email address from there…or there are scripts that people have written to do the task by simply automating a browser.  The former is tedious, the latter is likely to get you thrown off of Facebook.

However, a method documented hereshows how this can be done through the auspices of a Yahoo mail account.   It is apparently a legitimate application available within Yahoo Mail for the benefit of subscribers.  How long Facebook will allow this loophole to be exploited is anyone’s idea, but given that I have a number of Facebook friends I felt it worthwhile warning folks.

The problem is not you, my trusted and good and wonderful reader, who would only use the tool for what it’s intended for – added convenience in contact management.  The problem lies with people who are a bit free and easy about who they make friends with.  If you do end up befriending a less than trustworthy individual, they could quite happily get your email address through this method, and soon enough you’ll be receiving all those wonderful offers for life enhancing medication and get rich quick schemes.

So…watch who you befriend.  Today might be a good day to prune out those folks that you’re not one hundred percent sure about!

The further perils of real time search…

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A short while ago I wrote a couple of posts about the issues around Real time Search (How important is Real Time Search and Google and the Dead Past) – that is, Internet based searches that include Internet content that has been generated in the few minutes (or even less!) prior to the search.  Those of us who’ve been around the Internet for long enough will remember the days when you could wait days or weeks for stuff to show up in a Google search; nowadays Tweets can turn up in search results almost immediately.

There are many reasons – most expressed in the two posts above – that I have for feeling rather uneasy about the whole idea of real time search, particularly around personal privacy.  I think the main mistake I made when I wrote those two posts last year was to underestimate the speed with which things would move.  Recent developments in geolocation based systems – that record the location from which a post is made – such as FourSquare and the geocoding side of Twitter have made it easy for Tweets and similar online posts to locate people in the real world.  A particularly fine example of this phenomena is the suitably named ‘Please Rob Me’ – this site uses some clever coding to detect when people Tweet that they’re away from home. 

The publication of ‘exploits’ for web browsers and other software could also become a hot topic.  At the moment, a hacker may determine how to ‘poison’ a website with a specially manufactured piece of code that can infect an unprotected PC with a virus or Trojan Horse program.  The hacker can then publicise the fact via various means, hoping that others will get the chance to use it before the manufacturer of the browser relaeses a ‘patch’ for the bug that the code exploits.  Real time search could very much help hackers – by releasing details of an exploit, then linking to it from a few sites, then tweeting it, it’s quite possible that details of such exploits could be showing up in search results within minutes or hours of the exploit being identified.  Unless the search results are sanitised in some way to prevent this happening – highly unlikely – then this will surely lead to decreasing online safety.

A related problem might be in the creation of online Pop-up Shops’ for ‘warez’ or other illegal content.  For those who’ve never come across a ‘Pop-up Shop’ these are shops that take out a very short lease on a retail property – typically a month or so around Christmas or some other busy event that will guarantee good local footfall.  They then sell cheap goods, Christmas cards, etc. and then shut up shop and disappear – whilst these shops are totally legit business, the Internet equivalents are frequently not.  Given real time search, a suitably optimised ‘instant site’ with an arbitrary URL could be put on a server, show up in search engine indexes / Tweet indexes within the hour , make material available and be gone before the authorities even know it was there.

Real time search is here – faster and probably more effective than I feared.  And it’s not going to be pretty.

Internet access a ‘fundamental right’?

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I would say that I’m something of an ‘online person’ I ran a Bulletin Board ‘the hard way’ in the late 1980s / early 1990s using a phoneline, a modem and a PC at home, and have been on the Internet in one way or another for over 20 years, and was involved with Prestel back in 1982/83.  However, this article from the BBC made me do a serious reality check.   Nearly four out of five people in a survey done of 27,000 folks around the world considered that Internet access should be regarded as a ‘fundamental right’.

Now, this sort of thing crops up every now and again, and it always elicits the same response from me.  At this point in the history of our planet, nonsense.  Yes, information is increasingly important – even, or perhaps especially – in developing countries and economies.  But a ‘fundamental right’? No.  Let’s not forget that the Internet is a communications technology first and foremost – similar to the phone system, road and railway network, etc.  And let’s face it, there are many people in the world without access to a reasonable road and railway system, let alone  a phone system and the Internet.

Let me give you the run-down on precisely why I think that there are many rivers to cross before we get to the luxurious position of the Internet being a fundamental right.

The Internet can’t carry food…

Or people, or goods, or equipment.  An information superhighway is great in an information economy, but of limited use when you have a subsistence, agricultural or manufacturing based economy.  And let’s face it, whilst information is essential in developing new skills and supporting economies, it can be delivered in lots of old fashioned ways – like books, pamphlets, radio, TV.

The Internet needs power…

To deliver a reliable Internet service in to a country requires that that country have a viable and effective power supply.  Even now, many developing countries do not have reliable power.  Is it realistic to prioritise the right to the Internet over the right to a reliable and cheap energy source that can provide power for light, heating, entertainment, energy for industry? 

What’s the point of an Internet without machines…

Even with projects like OLPC and other ideas to get computers in to developing nations, there will still be the problem of providing equipment and software in to developing nations in a sustainable and long term manner.  A laptop computer – or a mobile phone, for that matter – is a complex piece of kit and is unlikely to be easily manufactured or maintainable locally. 

The Internet doesn’t educate or heal

Whilst the information on the Internet may be helpful in education, just how much of it is relevant without literacy?  And which is a more effective means of delivering basic and even advanced education in a developing nation?  $1000 spent on a computer that might help 1 person, or the same amount spent on books and similar resources for a class?  the Internet does not provide basic health care – it may provide useful information but cannot vaccinate.

The bottom line is that we live in a world of limited resources in which we have to prioritise those resources.  To claim the Internet is a fundamental right is to forget that the real fundamental rights – a home, food, safe water and no local Gestapo kicking the door in because you disagree with your Government – are yet to be achieved over much of the planet.  In a technologically advanced society their might be an excuse for this sort of comment, but in parts of the world where the next drink of water could kill you, it’s a luxury that cannot be realistically afforded.

Twitter – the medium is NOT the message!

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Regular readers of my ‘jottings’ might recall a recent post of mine in which I debated the value of Tweeted Wisdom.  Always one to consider returning to the scene of past musings, I was today motivated back in to Twitter criticism territory after I read a Tweet that suggested that:

 “100 is the new 140 for massive retweetlove”.

Now, I have enough problems with 140 characters, but then again I’m using Twitter to communicate ideas and concepts as well as gossip, funnies and bon-mot to the good folks following me.  Whether I get re-tweeted or not is not the first thing in my mind when I put a Tweet together – what matters to me is whether I can marshall the idea effectively in to the 140 character limit.

Starting to apply lower character limits to Tweets based purely on the possibility of re-tweeting does seem rather ‘arse about face’ to me – it IS putting the process of communication ahead of the content – i.e. putting the medium before the message.

Some years ago, the Ford Motor Company were in pretty dire straits – losing money and market.  There was a serious concern amongst the higher echelons at Deerborn that Ford might actually go under.  Various policies were implemented throughout the organisation, including cuts to the design and manufacturing base of the company.  The story goes that at one Board Meeting, some of the directors were commenting that they had managed to get the books looking better by reducing costs, and that most of the cost reductions had come from savings made by closing down manufacturing facilities.  A grizzled old veteran who DID know the difference between a carburetor and a Carbonara pithily pointed out that, based on that thesis, the best way to save the company was to close ALL the company’s manufacturing facilities and stop making cars altogether….

And this is how this sort of emphasis on the mechanism of Twitter strikes me; people get way too wound up with the phenomena and culture and technology of Twitter rather than the function – and the function of Twitter is to allow rapid, succinct communication and conversation between people.  Or even between people and other computer programs!  But the emphasis is on communication and conversation – and when we start emphasising the possibility of a re-tweet over the quality of content, we are in danger of making Twitter more ‘gimmicky’ – something that is not good.

So, for what it’s worth – use that character allowance for the purpose it was originally given to us – to communicate.  Giving 30% of available space up for posisble re-tweets seems pointless.  What matters is what you say; not necessarily how many times it gets re-tweeted.  The ultimate re-tweetable message accoridng to some folks would be a single word – don’t let the usefulness of Twitter be compromised by ego.

Google predict the end of desktop PCs….

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When I started in IT, I encountered a program called ‘The Last One’.  It was a menu-driven application generator that allowed a non-programmer to specify the sort of system they wanted (within a limited range) and generate a BASIC program that would do the job.  When it was first announced – and before any of us got to take a look at it – there was a little nervousness amongst the ranks of programmers, based on the advertising strapline for the program, that suggested the software was called ‘The Last One’ because it was the last program you would ever need to buy…

Which was, of course, utter rot.

I was reminded of it today after coming across this piece in which the bods at Google are predicting the  end of the desktop computer.  And the reason I was reminded was that the ‘The Last One’ story just went to show how bad IT pundits – and those in the industry – are at predicting the future.   You see, the problem with predicting the future is that you have to make certain assumptions and extrapolations from today in to the future, and then work out consequences based on those assumptions.  And if you get your assumptions of teh future wrong – or the assumptions of how the world works now – then it can all go horribly wrong.  And that’s what’s happened to Google.

The demise of the desktop computer – to be replaced by iPads, Smartphones and similar mobile devices.  Note that Google aren’t even suggesting that laptops and netbooks and their ilk will be delivering the goods – it’s all going to be a mobile wonderland.  Now, short of some sort of high tech ‘Rapture’ occuring in December 2012 that whisks away all the computers we use in our homes and offices whilst leaving only mobile computing devices behind, I very much doubt that this is going to happen.

Google have mixed up predicting the future with what they (with their interest in mobile operating systems and desire to compete with Apple) want the future to be.  A dangerous thing for a technology company to do.  Whilst in Google’s idea world of media and search consumers everyone would be able to do what they need to do on some sort of mobile gizmo, those of us who work with computers for serious amounts of time each day will NOT be able to function with  poxy little touchscreen keyboards or Blackberry QWERTY pads.  Sorry guys, we need real sized keyboards which will be realistically associated with a decent sized screen and so will be at the very least a reasonably sized laptop – which we’ll sit on a desk and run from the mains.

Quite a few of us also like the idea of storing data locally – not in ‘The Cloud’ or on Google’s application servers – something that isn’t easy on many mobile devices right now.

Google – you’re wrong.  Stop looking at the dreams of your own and other researchers, and start looking at how real people use computers – especially in their work.  And make that the basis of any more crystal ball gazing.