I Really Don’t Know

Now where did I put that enormous fan?

http://blog.flickr.net/en/2008/08/15/complicated-pile/

Unread Blog Count…

Having grouped (read pigeon-holed) the blogs I subscribe to into groups, the current unread counts are:

Should the President Use E-mail?

Should the President Use E-mail?

That’s the question posed by Freakonomics a few days ago, but not for the reasons you might suspect.

Apparently email is a good format for delivering bad news. That seems interesting, apparently the dropping of many social cues allows people to receive information in a less defensive attitude. That may well be, but my mother always said

If you’ve got something nice to say write it down, if it’s not so nice say it to their face.

Of course, she also said

If you haven’t got anything nice to say don’t say anything at all.

And if we’re on the subject of things parents tell their children you should check out today’s xkcd…

Going back to the question of Presidents receiving bad news, I’m not sure my mom’s second piece of advice would go down so well.

Device and Desires

Device and Desires:

Just bugger off Sony Ericsson, you’ve lost my respect. You’ve had thousands of pounds out of me in the past. But stick to student mobile phones called Kxxx with crap silly little jukeboxes on them, SmartPhones are out of your league.

Lost + Found

a while back, when I switched machines, I lost my feedreader - and all the blogs I was following with it. ho hum, a great opportunity to find out which I missed and to find new ones :->

Just discovered I miss Tinfoil + Raccoon. Paul and I caught up with Rochelle in the OCLC bloggers salon at ALA this summer. Much beer was consumed.

Anyhow, I found her again a few weeks ago and then realised today that she is certifiable. I mean, a typewriter? Unless you’re expecting imminent doom from some kind of electro-magnetic pulse or you’re a museum curator what on earth would you want one for? Even for $5 - you could have bought yourself a nice sandwich for that!

Technorati Tags: raccoon, rochelle, tinfoil

May Train Without Warning

I saw this on the back of a gun turret on HMS Belfast. It reminded me of various people I’ve worked with who “may train without warning”. Ivan, Richard, Rachel, Nick, Ian, Dan - Hi, still thankful for the things you taught me.

Twitter No More

I spent the last few weeks with a Twitter account. What an annoying piece of crap. I struggled to find any motivation to update mine - to twitter.

Seems I’m not alone.

So I shall be twittering no more.

Why virtual worlds suck…

And why they don’t have to…

So, I’ve been spending too much time in Second Life and broadly agree with Nad’s “The problem with Second Life“.

But why does it suck and what would I want instead? Well first I think Second Life is too much like real-life - the physical characteristics of the world are too similiar too restrictive. Sure, you can teleport; great. And you can fly, albeit very, very slowly. But broadly the things that slow you down IRL are the same things that slow you down ISL.

There are things that aren’t right yet, like how you show search results as objects, for example, but there are others too. ISL today my search results look like a whole load of blobs; arbitrary objects created by the search interface for me to rifle through. This isn’t the fault of those producing search interfaces, but the fault of the engine’s themselves.

The good news is we don’t have to look far for a more imaginative solution. In The Matrix¹ Neo needs guns, so guns arrive. He doesn’t move within the world, the world moves for him. That’s the kind of virtual world I want to play in.

In real-life when you want to, say, arrange books on the shelves of a library you have to choose a filing scheme - there are plenty around and they each serve a different blend of different needs. In a virtual library we could ditch the shelves altogether, but if we kept the shelves we could let people re-sort the shelves to meet their own needs - instantly and on-demand.

For that to work for many people at the same time that would mean the world that others are seeing would be slightly different from what I am seeing. That is to say that the while you and I may be stood next to the ’same’ shelves, the books may be arranged differently for me than for you. That might bring usability problems with it too at times, but at least it would be lifting the restrictions of this world.

Imagine, this is like being able to all sit around one TV, but watch your own programmes! I’ve wanted to do that since I was six; imagine the childhood fights that would stop!

If you think about it this is what websites do all the time, if we used a search perspective rather than a browse of the shelves, we could see a shelf as analogous to the search results page of a search engine - that’s seen by millions of people at the same time, but contains results for each of us. What if we could do the same for the shelves? A hundred of us could be stood looking at virtual shelves, seeing different results upon them.

Any aspect of the world could vary, the same corridor of shelving could be 50 feet long for me and only 20 feet long for you - there would be some work to do in mapping where people are stood within each others’ spaces, but that’s not too hard. Imagine what that could mean though. When I search for books now, I could get my own shelf of results - everyone stood in the search “room” would only see their own shelf. I could easily judge how many results I have by the length of the shelf. Perhaps there would be a way for me to collaboratively search and manipulate results with other people I invite to help me.

AFAIK the current virtual worlds don’t support this kind of personalised, run-time, programmatic remodelling of the physical space. And that’s why they suck - they’re too much like this world.

¹ This clip, The Matrix, Copyright 1999, Warner Bros

Spyware, OSX and Themes

Apple’s have been more secure than PCs for about as long as I can remember. It’s generally acknowledged, though, that a main reason for that is the lack of value in attacking one.

Seriously, writing a virus, some spyware or other piece of trojan software for the Mac would be pretty pointless with the market penetration they currently have. That’s not a dig - I’m a big Mac fan. I drool over the 17″ Powerbook whenever I pass one and if virtual pc for the mac were just that bit faster then I would seriuously consider it. But if you want market penetration for a piece of malignant code it’s not the platform to exploit.

With corporate and even home machines getting slowly more secure, the use of social engineering attacks, such as the email phishing scams for bank details, become more and more prevalent. One such misrepresentation attack that’s been around for ages, but appears to be on the increase is the use of flash, DHTML and other dynamic web content designed specifically to look like system dialogs. FUIs - Fake User Interface dialogs.

If you’ve spent any time at all on less reputable sites, for whatever reason, you’ll have seen them. Big exclamation icons with phrases like “you computer is infected with spyware, click here to disinfect”. Which should really read “this is an advert from a malicious spyware writer, click here to have your machine hijacked and/or infected”. If you want to see what I mean, look at examples of what was probably the first major campiagn of this type, by Bonzi. Oh, and the subsequent settlement to a class action lawsuit filed in Washington.

So, apart from the obvious benefit that a Mac isn’t vulnerable to the same exploits as a PC (a benefit you can get most of by browsing with Firefox instead of IE) there is another benefit. Everything on the Mac looks different. The window frames, the maximize, minimize and close buttons, the grey bevel buttons all look very different to a PC. This make it obvious to anyone using a Mac that the little dialog is an imposter and not part of the system.

As a poster on MetaFilter says so eloquently:

Of course, we Mac users are nothing but amused by those bogus “error” messages because, well… they don’t look like error messages to us, they look like cheap attempts to trick bumbling PC users into clicking through someplace they wouldn’t otherwise want to go…

You can achieve this effect on your PC, making it easier to recognise threats visually, by installing a skinning tool such as WindowBlinds. Making your windows look different to Windows could make the difference between clicking a dialog and not for many users.

Other, more traditional, tips & tricks can be found on Bruce Schnier’s blog.

not so luuuuurvely

thinking about this here screensaver a bit more I’ve decided this is a seriously flawed piece of kit.

Firstly, the idea is flawed. Spamer economics is based on very small, sometimes infinitesimally small margins, this applies to their mailings and is likely to apply to their hosting also. Even at its peak this screensaver is not likely to really impact them.

Secondly, the implementation is flawed. It clearly sends junk. Not only does this make it more likely to infringe regulation of some kind or another by being a deliberate attack, it also means that it’s content will be easy to filter - trivial in fact.

Thirdly, the implementation doesn’t send any kind of legitimate HTTP request. As most ISPs host many web sites on each machine they rely on a HTTP Host header in each request to identify whose site you’re asking for. As Make Love Not Spam doesn’t identify which site it’s asking for, and clearly identifies itself as a non-legitimate requestor it is unlikely that costs will ever be attrributed to the spammer. Not to mention the fact that the degradation in service will be affecting all the poor sites who, through no fault of their own, happen to be hosted alongside one of the targeted sites.

Finally - aren’t the spammers pissing away enough of the internet’s bandwidth without us pissing it away too? This isn’t the way.