A good essay concerning the growing reliance on technology to remember items we used to commit to memory. I will admit that the number of current phone numbers I can recall at this moment are about five, three of which are mine. I do comfort in the fact that all of my stored numbers are backed up in several locations, so the possibility of total loss is small, but what if I did not have any access to technology outside a traditional land line phone? With all of this instant access to information, is technology making us stupid?
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It is surprising how many people think only their friends can see their Facebook page. The majority would probably say otherwise when asked directly, but their actions say otherwise. No, this isn't going to be another rant against Facebook, but a rant against the perception of anonymity on the internet.
Few individuals realize the amount of personal information available on the internet. Even fewer realize how sophisticated data mining has become. Even when companies try to anonymize their usage data, people figure out a way to de-anonymize it. Basically, when you get down to it, the data is usually too fine grained for there to be enough of us for someone not to figure out who that data was from.
So imagine what kind of damage a motivated person can do with information you openly assign your name to, but which you think is behind lock and key. Back in the day, I was a member of a Linux mailing list -- yes, I am a geek -- and I am amazed how many mirrors of messages I posted in 2003 about squirrelmail still come up when I search for my name on my search engine of choice -- yes, I am a geek. Now, I didn't think that mailing list was private -- in fact, I knew that there was a public archive which was freely searchable by the public -- but I guess I thought it was a bit more obscure. If Google has taught you anything, it should be that nothing is obscure on the internet now. Thankfully, I don't think I have said anything which I would truly regret, but I haven't combed through every message. Now imagine if every web search you had made was leaked.
John Gruber at Daring Fireball points out that his website is not free. It is free to read the website, but he charges advertisers and sponsors to be associated with the site. So the question is not whether to charge, but who.
This is something the traditional news media has had a hard time figuring out. Traditionally, the newspapers would charge both the advertiser and the reader -- although there are also a number of newspapers which are free to the reader and completely supported by the advertisers, such as the Chicago Reader. Many traditional publications have struggled to make their online presence profitable and some are probably getting further from the black. Case in point, Financial Times editor, Lionel Barber, predicts "that 'almost all' new organizations will be charging for online content within a year." Again, Gruber has an interesting exposition concerning this pricing model of publishing online. It is like this guy does this for a living. Oh wait...
In any event, it will take time to persuade users to pay for something as massless as news online. At least with a physical newspaper the user feels they receive something of inherent worth -- it has a physical presence, a physical weight. Online news just does not have the gravity, in many ways.
Or how Google can offer so many products for "free".
There has been much published about Google in the recent weeks, particularly concerning its supposed "death blow" to Microsoft with their press release (actually a blog post, because this is Google after all) stating they are developing an operating system for netbooks which may be released as soon as the second half of 2010. I'll probably expound upon why I don't think this is a real game changer in a later post (preview: come on, it is just linux with a browser running on a small, underpowered notebook), but the announcement did make me think more about how Google funds all of these seemingly free projects.
Google states that 97% of their revenue in 2008 was generated from selling advertising. On the surface, this is where the dollars are coming in to keep the lights on, keep the servers running, and fund all of the new research. These ads appear on screen in many Google products and on many other websites which subscribe to Google's ad network. Now, do not get me wrong, I am not saying these ads are a bad thing. With the exception of The Deck ad network, Google's ads are probably the most innocuous ads on the web, usually just encompassing a list of text ads on the side of the screen. These tiny ads support many online services by generating money for the site whenever someone clicks on them, but there is also a reason they are so effective.
Google is able to target what ads are being displayed on a page by the content of the page. For instance, if I search for "how to make my lawn green", I'll probably get a an ad for a lawn care company. Or I may get an ad for environmentally friendly fertilizer. Now here is where it gets interesting, not only is Google looking at what I am searching, but they can also draw a profile on me from searches I have previously done or sites I have visited to better target the ads. I may get different ads if I had previously searched for "green projects" versus if I had searched for "home services". Now, let's add on top of this data that Google also has at its disposal from my gmail account, calendar, and RSS feeds. We voluntarily give Google (virtual) mountains of data in exchange for free services.
This isn't a new concept and isn't entirely the domain of Google. Facebook and MySpace also exchange services for personal data and trends. Your local grocery chain probably has a loyalty program -- that little swipe card -- that allows them to track what you buy in exchange for some discounted items. In and of themselves, these are not necessarily bad things (assuming these companies keep this data securely and confidentially). I am not trying to be a privacy nut here, but I think people should be aware of what they are giving up in exchange for these "free" services. You may not be paying out of your wallet for these services, but you are paying with your personal information and attention to some advertising.
I was waiting for something like this to come up with the unlocked/jailbroken iPhones. I remember reading an article a year or two ago about hacking Time Machine to do network backups before it was allowed, and the author basically saying "here is the theory behind what you have to do, so if you know what you are doing, go right ahead and proceed with caution." Basically saying, I've given you enough rope, it is up to you to hang yourself. In a follow up, he said he was inundated with requests for a step-by-step description of the hack, but as he stated in the original article and reiterated then, he wasn't going to do it because he did not want to be responsible for broken backups, which would happen frequently if there was a network hiccup during backup. Instead, he had published information which would allow someone to replicate his hack if they knew a little bit about how the system works, hoping that if they knew how the system works, they would also know why modifying the system would be a bad idea and what the consequences may be -- in this case, broken backups.
So let's go back to the "hacktivated" iPhones. Step-by-step descriptions of modifying your iPhone exist on the web and are relatively easy to find. What is not necessary to follow these instructions are an intimate knowledge of how the hack works and what it might be affecting. The story linked above illustrates that hacking your phone may have consequences beyond being able to run unauthorized programs or use it on a non-sanctioned network, it may break core functionality of the phone. If you hack your phone, please be responsible enough to own up to it and not blame someone else for breaking your phone. You broke your own phone when you hacked it.
Update: So the plot thickens. Now users who hacked their iPhones are getting each other's push notifications.
I use both Windows and Mac in the course of a normal day and have grown used to the differences between the two platforms. I use a Windows ThinkPad for my day job and a MacBook Pro for my personal business. The differences become glaring when I use the two side by side while working from home hooked up to the same keyboard, mouse, and monitor via a KVM.
One thing that makes absolutely no sense to me is why Outlook treats incoming email as an editable document. Shouldn't the email be preserved as sent from the original author? Why should I be able to change the information in the email? Sure, if I am forwarding or replying to the email I should be able to edit the content then, but why would I want to as I am reading it?
Where this behavior really irritates me is deleting a message after I read it. In Apple Mail I can hit either the Delete (Backspace on non-Apple keyboards) or Forward Delete (Delete on non-Apple keyboards) key and the message is deleted from my inbox. This behavior makes sense to me. To get the same action in Outlook using a keyboard I have to hit cntl-D, which is not that difficult, but not nearly as obvious as the Delete or Backspace key. If you hit the Delete or Backspace key while reading an incoming message in Outlook, it attempts to delete a character in the message (usually, the cursor will be at the beginning of the message, so the Backspace key will generate an error sound as it has no character to delete, whereas Delete will delete the first character of the message).
Even more inexplicably, if I close the message first and then try to delete it from the inbox listing in Outlook, hitting Backspace sends me to the Calendar (Why?), whereas Delete does perform the expected action. If someone could please explain the theory behind these actions, please feel free to contact me. End Rant.
