Addressing the issue

There are many articles about the government’s new plan to force ISPs to collect and retain customers’ activity data written by people far smarter than me.  One that I particular recommend is by Geordie Guy here: You want my metadata, George Brandis? Get a warrant.

The government insists it is “only” collecting metadata, which Tony Abbott says is like the address on the front of an envelope.  Attorney General George Brandis repeated the analogy in a truly cringeworthy interview where he insisted that recording the “electronic address” of a website in no way reveals the content of that website.

To choose an analogy close to Senator Brandis’ heart, that’s like saying an ISBN doesn’t tell you the title, author, subject and edition of a book.

Mind you, the address on a letter, while still being a grossly misleading over-simplification, is perhaps more apt than Abbott and Brandis realise – and not in any way that supports their case.

We all have Google Street View. Give me a random address on an envelope and within two minutes, I’ll show you a picture of the house.

From that picture, we can begin to build a profile of the resident. We can get an idea of their socio-economic status; their habits, like how often they weed the garden; whether they have the curtains open at a particular time of day; what type of car they drive…  It’s not innocuous information. It tells you a lot, and more than it used to.

And if metadata didn’t contain any meaningful, identifiable information, why would anyone want to have it?

There is no doubt we are being governed by luddites.  A perennial question of mine when it comes to idiotic policy is: Are they stupid, or do they think we’re stupid?  This is one case where I’m certain of the answer, and it’s both.  They are stupid and they think we’re just as stupid as they are.

Kirribilli House earlier this year

Playing the platitudes
I heard a grab of Bill Shorten speaking at the MH17 memorial today saying, “Remember not how they died but how they lived.”

I know that a memorial should be as much a celebration of life as mourning death, and I know that’s the kind of thing you’re supposed to say at memorials, but this is really disingenuous.  As if we would be remembering these people in this way if not for how they died.  I’m sure they were all lovely people and I have the greatest sympathy for all their friends and families, but the truth is that we would not be honouring them this way if they had died differently, separately and at different times.

Yes, we should remember them for how they lived but that’s not why we’re remembering them.  Let’s be honest with ourselves and admit that we’re remembering them as victims of an atrocity.
  
 

For those who Facebook

   

BREAKING NEWS... BREAKING NEWS...

Microsoft to sue Apple for trademark infringements

Lawyers for the Redmond company claim that creating their own version of a perfectly good program, forcing people to switch to it and releasing it before it's ready are universally recognised as part of the Microsoft brand and that Apple has clearly breached those trademarks with the inclusion of Apple maps in its iOS6 release.

More information as it comes to hand...

http://theamazingios6maps.tumblr.com/
 

Your call may be recorded…

I had yet another one of those spam ’phone calls this afternoon saying, “We have found a problem with your Windows computer.”  Since I had some time on my hands, I decided to have some fun with him.

It’s not the first time I’ve strung one of them along like this, but it’s the first time I’ve recorded it, inspired by Danie and Mark’s experience HERE.

My reasons for doing this are a little deeper than just trying to troll a scammer for fun.  Being an IT tutor, I’m asked about these scams regularly so I was interested to know the specific nature of the scam.  So I started off playing innocent and going along with all his instructions.  The number he quotes at about 8:12 will appear on just about any Windows Vista computer.  I switched gears about half way through and tried my best to make it clear to him that I knew it was a complete con, but he didn’t take the hint.

Most of these callers are very insistent that they are giving you good advice, and “Charlie’s” exasperation with me at 25:38 suggests that these callers may be trained to believe what they are saying.  At that point, I completely drop the act and make it clear to him that under no circumstances will I install the remote access software he wants me to install.  I don’t know what their intentions would have been if I had installed it, but if a stranger wants remote access to your computer, you know they’re up to no good.

I don’t expect anyone to suffer through the whole 35 minutes of this, but if you’ve ever wondered what their act is, this will give you an idea.



I would also like to make it clear that I was not doing this just for the sake of tormenting the person on the other end of the ’phone.  As I say to him at the end of the call, I understand that everyone needs to make a living and that I don’t take or intend any of this personally.  In fact, I am planning a future post on how to make help-desk calls easier for both sides.  Mind you, when someone has called you out on the scam, attack is not the best form of defence.

I had to go out after that, but they actually called back an hour later.  This time, my dearest took the call and she has a different, and completely true, method of dealing with them.

 - We have detected a problem with your Windows computer.
“Really?  I use a Mac.”
 - Are you not using a Windows computer?
“What part of ‘I use a Mac,’ did you not understand?”
 - beep… beep... beep...
 

A billion dollar idea

You can just imagine the conversation…

“So, I’ve made this app.”

 - Okay, what does it do?

“Well, you know those smartphones with the really good cameras?  Well, this app takes a photo with that camera and makes it look like an old polaroid, or a washed-out slide, or one of those lomography photos.”

 - Why would anyone want to do that?

“It looks cool.”

 - If you say so.  How much are you going to charge for it?

“Nothing.  It’s a free download.  But we will host the photos people post.”

 - Ah right, and you’ll have ads there?

“Um, no.  Well, not yet.  Maybe.”

 - And you can get this on any phone?

“No, just the one.  Maybe some others later.”

 - Well, I suppose it’s all good practice for you but I can’t see you making any money from it.

Now Facebook has bought Instagram.  That’s not surprising in itself.  These things happen all the time.  What is surprising is that they paid roughly one billion dollars for it.  And this is for a service that according to its own FAQ has no specific plans for monetising what it does. 

Paying that kind of money for that kind of service has led many to make comparisons with the dot-com crash at the turn of the century and News Corp’s disastrous takeover of MySpace.  Obviously for the sale to have happened, two sets of people would have to have thought two sets of things.  Instagram would have to think that they make more money out of their product this way than by any other way (seems like a bit of a no-brainer), and Facebook would have to think that they’re going to make more than a billion dollars from the acquisition.  I’ll give them the benefit of the doubt that they’re not completely insane.  It’s possibly a better investment than Google buying YouTube for 1.65 billion dollars in 2006.  YouTube is massively popular – to the extent of being the world’s second most used search provider after Google itself – but as Slate reported in 2009, it bleeds money due to phenomenal bandwidth costs.

Of course, this is all private money going on private things, but just consider this the next time you think too much money is spent on the space program.  Mark Zuckerberg just spent a billion dollars on a service that makes photos look old and crappy. 

And just by coincidence, the second payout in the CSIRO Wi-Fi patent case was reported last week.  Between the two payouts, the CSIRO gets roughly 425 million dollars, or less than half the purchase price of Instagram.  Think that through for a moment.  International readers should also note that CSIRO stands for Commonwealth Scientific and Industrial Research Organisation – Australia’s national science agency.  That’s right teabaggers, you got your Wi-Fi from socialism!

I’ve got nothing against Instagram per se.  I’ve used it and some other similar apps.  It’s fun to play around with the filters and I follow some people on Twitter who create some really beautiful pictures with it.  However, the ubiquity of the app has begun to annoy me.

At the risk of overthinking things, the tone of a picture or film always gives clues to when the picture was taken.  I remember when colour film of 1930s nazi Germany was discovered.  It looked literally unreal because to those of us who weren’t there at the time, anything before about 1956 was in black and white.  That’s why Spielberg shot Schindler’s List in black and white.  It wasn’t to be artistic, it was to be realistic because every picture we have of the real concentration camps is in black and white, so to film it in true colour would not have been as convincing.  Colour didn’t come in large quantities until the 50s, so the colour footage of pre-war Germany initially looks like it’s from the 50s.  Television is the same.  There’s a particular look to videotape from the 60s and 70s.  You don’t have to be a photographic expert to get a rough idea of when a photo was taken just from the colour and saturation.   Now with Instagram and dozens of copycat services, that’s being muddied.  I wouldn’t be surprised if there are teenagers who have looked at their grandparents’ wedding photos and just assumed they had Instagram.

How the spire fire might have looked
if it had happened in 1977

It wouldn’t be such a problem if the service were just used for being creative, but its ubiquity has meant that increasingly, photos of record are being Instagrammed.  When the spire of the Victorian Arts Centre in Melbourne caught fire from new year’s eve fireworks, one of the first pictures was posted on Twitter and picked up by both major newspapers’ websites, but it was bloody Instagram!  Photo filters should never be used for something like that.  Then just a few days later, there was five minutes of slight interest when it was announced that Barack Obama had joined Instagram.  There’s no doubting that Obama is the first social media president, but this is too much.  Fair enough that he posts announcements online and does his weekly address on YouTube, but it’s undignified for a national leader to post photos taken through the “toaster” filter. 

There was also a big deal made around the time of Obama’s inauguration that he was the first president to have his official portrait taken with a digital camera.  It was a complete non-story – that was a historical inevitability.  What worries me is that if his official portrait were taken this year, it might look more like this.

And that could cause future scholars to think, “I thought Obama was elected in 2008, not 1968.”
Or even worse, they might look at photos from the 20th century and wonder what Instagram filter they were taken with because we’ve confused the visual dating methods so much.
  

   

A Present-Day Himself

The untimely passing of Steve Jobs has brought a torrent of praise.  Most of that praise is well deserved.  His influence on modern life, whether one is immediately aware of it or not, is significant.  However, the enthusiasm by some to gush over his achievements ends up doing him a disservice.  Reports have compared Jobs to Thomas Edison, Pablo Picasso and Leonardo Da Vinci – sometimes in the same sentence.   This is not fair to any of them.

It’s fair to say Steve Jobs was a visionary.  His gift was not so much in either the creation of the hardware nor the coding of the software, or even in the specific design of either.  Jobs’ brilliance was in gathering people who are experts in those fields and motivating them to make it work like this and look like that.  The products which Jobs presided over the design of, are perfect marriages of complexity, simplicity and beauty. (yes, it’s a ménage a trois – what’s your point?)  This is not to say that Apple is never overrated.  I believe they have cheapened their brand somewhat over recent years by overstating the significance of features and the careful rationing of some of those product features.  Early iPhones didn’t even have 3G at a time when any other phone worth talking about did.  One of the big new features of the iPhone 4, released last year, was video calling – a feature I’d had on my Nokia since 2008, and it wasn’t state of the art even then.  And it challenges credulity to think that the new features of the iPad 2 couldn’t have been worked into the iPad 1, released less than a year earlier.  If nothing else, it would have saved the poor buggers at Foxconn a lot of retooling.

I don’t attribute any of this to Steve Jobs personally.  I am neither a fanboy, nor a hater, just trying to keep some perspective.  Steve Jobs did not invent the Graphical User Interface or the mouse.  That would be Xerox.  In fairness, Steve Jobs never claimed to have invented those things, nor did he ever encourage the notion that he did, but listening to some reports today, it would be easy to believe it was all Apple’s idea because the Macintosh was the first commercially available computer to have a GUI.  This was Steve Jobs’ real talent – to be an aggregator of ideas.  He didn’t invent the MP3 player.  Instead, he perfected the idea and expanded the notion to become a smartphone and a tablet computer.  This list of what Steve Jobs did and didn’t do sums it up very nicely.

That’s one reason why comparisons with inventors and designers of the past are inappropriate.  The other reason is that it’s just so unnecessary.

Seriously, how brilliant do you have to be, how broad your influence, before you get to stand alone?  How great must your achievements be before they don’t have to be described in terms of what others did?  Steve Jobs was not a modern day Da Vinci.  That’s the difference between being a couple of decades ahead of your time and a couple of centuries ahead of your time.  He was not Pablo Picasso, the main reason being that Steve Jobs’ designs are beautiful.  I’m not saying that Picasso wasn’t a great artist but I wouldn’t want to have to look at one of his works for several hours a day.  The Edison analogy probably comes closest to being fair.  They were both showmen as much as innovators, and that showmanship was invaluable to promoting the product.  Both created a simple music player that would evolve into something that changed the way we live.  But who was Thomas Edison the contemporary equivalent of?  The answer is: a long line of people who were equal parts genius and madman, looking everywhere for an idea that would make them rich and famous.  Edison managed to find a couple.

I stopped describing Paul Kelly as a modern-day Henry Lawson (although I still believe it’s a fair comparison) after reading how Lawson was offended at being called an Australian Rudyard Kipling.  Although it was meant as a compliment, Henry Lawson was not Rudyard Kipling – he was Henry Lawson.  Every teenage guitarist wants to be the next Jimi Hendrix.  There are those in their 50s still trying to be.  The point they all miss is that Hendrix wasn’t trying to be the next Robert Johnson, Chet Atkins or BB King – he wanted to be the first Jimi Hendrix.  He succeeded, and to this day, there has never been a better one.  That’s why my advice to young guitarists is that if you want to be like Hendrix, forget about Hendrix.  Throw everything out and start again.  That’s exactly what Steve Jobs did.  He wasn’t trying to be the next anyone.

This is not to say that some geniuses don’t start out trying to emulate others.  Bob Dylan wanted to be Woody Guthrie.  Today though, you would never describe Bob Dylan as ‘the Woody Guthrie of the 60s.’  If you had to explain to someone who Bob Dylan is, the most appropriate answer would probably be, “Are you nuts?  He’s Bob friggin’ Dylan!”

Steve Jobs was not a modern day Edison, Picasso or Da Vinci.  He was not Archimedes, Bach, Alexander Graham Bell, Guglielmo Marconi, Nikola Tesla, John Logie Baird or Frank Lloyd Wright.  He was Steve Jobs.  If that in itself isn’t good enough for you, then you’re probably in for a life of disappointments.
 

What Twitter Bio Are You?

Twitter generously gives you 20 extra characters with which to describe yourself to the world but very often, Twitter bios can be broken down into several types. Some of these types include,

The disclaimer
Favoured of journalists, publicists, public servants and anyone who thinks (or would like to think) that their tweets might be misinterpreted as being endorsed by their employer. Insists their tweets are personal but still wants you to know who they work for. 

The false modesty
A favourite of politicians. Attempts to look awfully ordinary and down-to-earth but comes clean in the last line. 

The business operator
Lists fabulous achievements, then asks you to hire them to design your website. 

The in-your-face
Lists all their less-likable qualities. Usually among the more honest Twitter bios. 

The reverse psychology
Not unlike the in-your-face, but pushes it to the next level in faint hope of being contradicted. 

The follower-whore
Doesn’t care who you are, just wants bigger numbers. Follows more than 16,000 people. Offers to follow you like that’s something desirable.

The troll
Exposes their troll nature by proclaiming qualities that would be self evident if they had them. Always spells “you’re” as “your.”

Another troll tactic is to attempt to soften their image with a half-joke: 

The hashtagger
Like a cross between the troll and the follower-whore. In lieu of actually listing interests, fills bio with controversial hashtags.  

The fake verified account
Thinks they’re clever putting a ✓ after their name. Not fooling anyone but themselves. 

The issues tweeter
Uses twitter exclusively to bang on about pet issues and RT similar obsessives. Only engages with others when trolling those of opposing views. 

The geek
Probably is a geek but anyone can be a geek about anything these days. 

The joker
Moderately self-deprecating space-filler. 

Captain Obvious
For want of anything better, chooses to go with the things that apply to everyone.

It’s worth pointing out that the often predictable nature of Twitter bios is not necessarily a reflection on the individuality, wit and general appeal of the tweeter themselves.
Feel free to add your own.

Suck it up, iSnobs

2010 may have been the year of the iPad but it was also the year Apple really tarnished its brand.  By far, the greatest number of complaints I saw about technology, were not about what a beast of a thing Windows is.  Instead, they were mostly about people being screwed around by their iPhones.  Does this mean iPhones are crap?  On no!  They’re still the greatest thing since the last Apple product, despite the fact that you have to hold them just so or they don’t bloody work at all.

Oh really?

Steve Jobs’ petulant talk – oops, sorry, “keynote address” in response to the ‘death grip’ problem further damaged Apple’s reputation for things that simply work.  (Funny how none of the reviews of the leaked prototypes mentioned that). He said that all smartphones have similar problems.  That may well be, but that kind of makes a mockery of the “This changes everything. Again,” slogan, doesn’t it?  Now you’re saying it’s the same as all the others.  Besides, I had video calls on my Nokia two years earlier - that was hardly a new innovation.  Sure, the problem may have been blown out of proportion, but so is the hype surrounding every Apple release.  The backlash was entirely proportional to the expectations Apple had set up.

It all serves to remind us of something Douglas Adams said, which is that “technology” is stuff that doesn’t work yet.  We don’t regard a chair as technology because the principle has been established and perfected.  Things like computers and mobile devices are still evolving and as such, they have problems.  All of them.  Even Apple products.  It would probably be churlish of me to suggest that there is something karmic in the iPhone being humiliated by something as basic as not knowing that Australia has daylight saving.  And again today, social media is abuzz with another iPhone bug, again related to the alarm clock.  I mean really, the alarm clock?  How basic is that?

I’m not here to defend Microsoft or to diss Apple but I think it’s time someone called bullshit on the notion that with Apple, the shit just works and everything else is crap.  Any time there’s a problem with PCs, you can take bets on how long it will be before someone offers the constructive suggestion, “Should’ve bought a Mac.”

In that spirit then, my suggestion to all those who were woken early or slept late because their iPhones is,

You should’ve bought a Nokia or Android.

That shit just works.

The NBN Will Not Fix Your Computer

Last night the 7:30 Report aired an article on the release of the National Broadband Network business plan.  As part of getting all sides of the story, they spoke to a lady in Tasmania who is connected to the NBN and believes it isn’t providing the service promised, with slow and unreliable connections.

However, take a look at some of the shots of her computer:

The wide shot shows that she has at least three third-party toolbars installed.  The closer shot shows that one of them is the Google toolbar and another contains links to Screensavers, Smiley Central and Cursor Mania.  The report states that she has had technicians out to look at the problem several times.  If I were one of those technicians, I would have taken one look at that toolbar and said, “There’s your problem!”

As a teacher of, and trouble-shooter for computer novices, I regularly have to explain the difference between computer speed and connection speed.  Up until about ten years ago, the internet was a very handy add-on for a computer.  Today, it’s the only reason most people buy a computer at all.  As such, it means that “non-computer people” are even more confused between problems with the internet and problems with the computer.  This is why I often have to tell people that upgrading their internet connection will not make Adobe Reader load any faster and increasing their RAM will not speed up their downloads.

Let me be clear that I am not making any comment on Ms Jenkins’ internet connection.  For all I know, it may be just as bad as she says it is and even if it isn’t, I don’t doubt that she has made those complaints in good faith.  What I am saying is that the problem shown in the report is a classic case of browser lock up that would have happened if she were on dial-up, ADSL, 3G wireless or fibre to the home.  The report states that when they were there, it took six minutes to “connect,” however, picture below clearly shows that the browser has crashed while trying to load the add-on toolbars.

I’m not a computer snob who expects everyone to know the technical details of how software works or thinks everyone should set their computer up the same way I would.  However, toolbars are a menace.  You don’t need them.  Want to search for something?  Go to www.google.com.  Need a shortcut to Gmail or Ebay?  Put them in your favourites/bookmarks.  Toolbars do nothing but take up screen space and system resources, and they collect data on how you use them.  Having one is bad enough, but having three or four all trying to do the same things is utterly pointless.  Furthermore, that smiley central toolbar is well known for turning perfectly decent computers into frustrating pieces of crap.  While it probably isn’t the reporter’s place to point this out – he simply presented Ms Jenkins’ story as it was told to him – what was shown did not present any evidence of the NBN being substandard.  Also, whether it was their job to or not, the technicians should have done her a favour and ditched those toolbars and shown her how to use SpyBot.


Watch the report,
iTunes:  http://mpegmedia.abc.net.au/730report/video/podcast/r692331_5227737.m4v
Windows:  http://mpegmedia.abc.net.au/730report/video/podcast/r692331_5227734.wmv

Apples to Apples

In seemingly tragic news for Beatles fans - or those just wondering what all the fuss over these 'Beatles' things is all about - the release of the Beatles' catalogue on iTunes has been delayed yet again.  Yoko Ono has said that there is an element of negotiations with Apple computers that they are not happy with, adding, "Don't hold your breath."
Such news may make iPod owners despair of ever being able to listen to some of the most influential music ever made on their fashionable digital devices.  So far, the only way to buy compressed digital versions of the Beatles' music is to spend a fortune on the Beatles USB drive which contains all the albums in MP3 and FLAC formats.  So what's a music lover to do?

Well, fear not!  I'm here to help.  Believe it or not, I have all the Beatles' albums on my iPod - mono and stereo - and I'm going to show you how you too can have the world's most popular music on the world's most popular music player.

First, buy a Beatles CD.  Yes, I know you want it on your iPod, not your CD player, but keep reading.  If you're not sure how to buy a CD, there are a couple of different ways.  You could order it from an online retailer such as Amazon.com or alternatively, you could explore your local shopping mall or main street to see if there is a record shop there.  Record shops sell CDs to the public face to face.  Be aware that this method does involve leaving the house and is therefore not recommended for agoraphobics except under strict supervision.  

The method we are going to use will work on both the old CDs and the newly remastered ones.  It will even work on the mono versions so there's no need to worry about whether you bought the right one.

Once you have obtained your Beatles CD, remove it from the cover, and insert it into your computer's CD/DVD drive.  Then, start iTunes.

Now, here comes the clever bit:  Don't go to the iTunes store.  Instead, have a look just below the Store link, and you should see the CD listed there.  If you're lucky, iTunes will have downloaded the CD title and track-list information already.  Then, all you have to do is click Import CD at the bottom-right corner of the iTunes window.

You will not be asked for confirmation that you want to purchase these tracks because you actually already have!  iTunes will then magically convert the music on the CD to the same format that you would purchase from the iTunes store.  This will happen a lot quicker than downloading the songs because there's nothing to download.  It's all done on the computer and in a few short minutes, you'll have an entire Beatles album in your iTunes library.

What's more, you don't even have to back up your purchases because you already have a backup copy in the form on the CD.  The disc can be played on your stereo, in your car, or just safely stored away until your hard drive crashes or your iPod gets lost.

Now comes the tricky bit:  you have imported the music into your iTunes library, but how to get it onto your iPod?  Because I am something of an advanced user, I have turned the automatic sync off.  So what I would do would be to browse my iTunes library for the Beatles album I have just imported, and drag it onto my iPod on the left.  However, you probably have auto-sync turned on, and if so, all you have to do is plug your iPod in, and within minutes, you will have the Beatles on your iPod!  Amazing, huh?

You might have noticed that we used Abbey Road for this example, but you can use the same process for any Beatles album.  The only thing to be careful of is that if you buy the White Album, it comes on two discs.  You will need to make sure you follow the above process for both discs, or otherwise, you will only have half the album on your iPod.  The same applies to Live at the BBC, Anthology 1, 2 and 3, and the Red and Blue albums.  You might like to wait until you've have a bit of practice before you have a go at those ones.  

At this point, you might be thinking, "Wow! It's so easy to get Beatles songs on my iPod, it's amazing that other artists haven't thought of this!"  Well, guess what?  All kinds of artists distribute their music this way, from download sceptics like Led Zeppelin, Metallica and Radiohead to darlings of the download age like Arctic Monkeys and Lady Gaga.  

Remember, you don't have to like artists on the cutting edge of technology to do this.  Got a soft spot for Buddy Holly?  Love a bit of Louis Armstrong?  Can't get enough Karajan?  You can get them all without ever having to worry about exceeding your bandwidth.  You can even do it with non-musical recordings such as comedy performances, audio books or Justin Bieber.  

So now you never have to worry about iTunes not carrying an artist again.  Happy listening!

If You’ve Done Nothing Wrong, There’s Plenty to Worry About

The latest idea from the Federal Department of Stuffing Up the Internet is even more counter-productive than the last one.  I haven’t written about the proposed (and now delayed) ISP level filtering – the so-called ‘clean feed’ – simply because others have already done so far better and at more length than I could have.  But the new plan to require that ISPs log and retain data about all their customers’ web-browsing is even worse.  It would be electoral suicide if enough people understood what it would mean. 

Again, others have written about the gross invasion of privacy.  I want to explore a different angle, that of data versus intelligence.  Defenders of any form of surveillance often come out with the line that if you’re doing nothing wrong, then you’ve got nothing to worry about.  That holds true when it comes to security cameras at stations (I’m all for them) but on the internet, there are plenty of ways to look like you might be doing something wrong when you’re not.  Here are some examples from personal experience:

As mentioned in the fragment of bio to the right of your window, I teach computers – mostly to novices.  The week before our first session on the internet, I always ask students to bring in an internet address they’d like to look up, and a topic they would like to search the internet for.  One nice older gentleman, who was attending with his wife, wanted to look up information about the gold rush.  Specifically, he wanted to get some information about the guards who protected the prospectors who had come over from South Australia as they brought their take home.  These guards were called the Gold Escorts, so my student wanted to search for gold escorts south australia.  It was a perfectly legitimate search for a perfectly innocent reason, so you can imagine my discomfort at having to warn him, while his wife was sitting beside him, that such a search query could also reveal more than he ever wanted to know about Adelaide nightlife.  We did the search anyway, with the warning of what it might deliver, and the results were about 50/50 historical articles and (ahem) adult services.  The ads, however, were 100% the latter. 

Then there was the time I was showing a group how to set up a web-mail address.  One of the students was a Filipino lady with not much English.  For reasons that I couldn’t really glean at the time, she had chosen ‘porn’ as her login name.  To save us both the embarrassment of having to explain the word, I just told her that it was such a common word on the internet that it had probably been taken and she’d best choose something else.

Earlier this year, I had a student who wanted to look up the Anarchist Cookbook.  I told him that was fine but, with the clean feed proposal, to just be mindful of how it might look if his search history were revealed.  There are numerous legitimate and innocent reasons why someone might want to look up the Anarchist Cookbook, or Mein Kampf, or Das Kapital, but it’s just as easy for someone on a fishing trip to look at those searches, put 2 and 2 together, and get 97.

This is all assuming that people are aware of what they are doing.  As we all know, a lot of people who use the internet have no idea of what they are doing.  The more experienced ’net users know that you can point to THIS LINK and see the true address displayed in the bottom left corner of the browser window.  But with URL shorteners and aggregators, there’s no way of knowing where http://bit.ly/b7ly6X will take you until you click it.  No form of data collection can take that into account.  How would anyone like to take responsibility for every link they’ve innocently clicked and then regretted it?  How would anyone like a misunderstood search query going on their permanent record?

Of course, in the examples I gave above, the history would not reflect on them because they were not at home, they were at my workplace.  Those examples could easily be looked at out of context and someone could say, “Escorts? Porn? Anarchists? Just what is he teaching those people?”  Well, I’m teaching them about the internet, and these things happen on the internet.

And this leads to the other reason that retaining everyone’s browsing history will not work.  Anyone who really is a threat to public safety on any level, is not going to be using a visible internet account.  They will either be using public internet access or a series of proxies.  They’re not stupid.  They’ve seen Spooks too.  So unless the government intends to force every café, every hotel, every library, every McDonald’s to put its customers through the same kind of application process that it usually takes to get a mobile phone, then this latest scheme is not going to make anyone any safer.  It simply gives the illusion of doing something useful while making us all a bit more paranoid.

Well, do you drive a car?

This has been the response from some to the growing outrage and disgust over the oil leak in the Mexican gulf.  (It’s not a “spill.”  A spill is a finite amount that breaks its containment.  This slick is coming directly from the source, and it keeps on coming.)  The inference is that anyone who uses petrol, or any petroleum-based product, is implicated in this disaster. 

Let me be honest:  I like stuff.
I like stuff that lights up.  I like stuff that makes noises.  I like stuff that connects to other stuff.  I like stuff that stores lots of other stuff inside it.  Most of the stuff I like is made mostly of plastics, and that means oil.  Most of the stuff I like is made overseas, and that means more oil.  And I like going to places where there’s other stuff, which means lots more oil.  Most of the stuff I like is packaged in plastic too – more oil.  In fact, I dislike the packaging very much, but I like the stuff more than I dislike the packaging, so I end up erring on the side of stuff.  Not for me, the life of zero-footprint self-sufficiency.  I like my stuff too much.

Hello, my name is Bill and I’m a consumer.

So, to those who rationalise the BP disaster, we’re all a little bit culpable. 
Well wait just an oil-drillin’ minute!  I didn’t ask BP to drill there.  And I didn’t ask them to hire those contractors.  The fact that I drive a car doesn’t mean I have to condone industrial manslaughter.  (Please let’s not forget that eleven people were killed in the explosion.)  Do you have to be teetotal to condemn drink driving?  Do you have to be celibate to abhor rape?  I’ll take my share of the blame for the industrialised world’s dependence on oil.  I admit I’m part of the problem there.  But I’m calling the bluff of anyone who tries to draw a line between consumers of oil-based products and what’s happening in the Mexican gulf.  That was not done in my name.  I live in a house but that doesn’t mean I have to accept shonky builders.  I use Windows but that doesn’t mean I have to condone Microsoft’s business practices.  If BP had been putting similar resources into renewable energy, I would be cheering them on.


And it’s at this point, that this article takes a left turn with an idea that only came to me half-way through writing it.  The oil companies and car manufacturers have a chicken-and-egg problem when it comes to sustainable energy.  There’s no point in energy companies developing better energy sources if the car companies keep making vehicles that run on petrol.  And there’s no point in car makers producing hybrid or hydrogen powered cars if there’s nowhere that will fuel them.  And if the car manufacturers and oil companies were to work on a design together, that would be collusion.  It’s a rather convenient situation for them all.

What we need is a car designed by Apple.  The reason Apple products tend to be so reliable is because the hardware and the software is designed in tandem.  For some reason, Apple gets away with this monopolistic behaviour and is praised for it where Microsoft would be pilloried and probably sued if they did the same thing.  I wrote at length on that a couple of years ago and will post it here later for reference.  What we need is for Apple’s holistic design techniques to be applied to the automotive industry.  They would design the engine and the fuel source at the same time.  Then, since anything with an Apple logo on it inspires instant fascination and desire, retailers would have to do whatever it takes to get it onto the market.  Naturally, the designs would be copied by others within 12 months, but that’s kind of what we want, isn’t it?

Look into it, Steve.  A lot of people thought the world didn’t need another phone either.

Why Y2K Mattered ....and still does

I was flicking through a book called History’s Worst Decisions and the People Who Made Them and there’s a chapter in the back of it called The Y2K That Never Came. Ten years later seems like a good time to talk about a problem that is even more misunderstood now that it was then.

To recap, when computers were in their infancy, any amount of data processing that could be simplified was of great benefit, so when it came to dates, the year was abbreviated to the last two digits, as has always been common practice when writing dates. They knew even in the 50s, that this would cause problems come the turn of the century but assumed that by then computers would be so advanced that it wouldn’t matter. The problem with leaving things up to the future is that eventually, the future arrives. Computers were of course advanced enough by then but the software they were running was often built on top of decades of older versions that still expressed the year as two digits. In the mid 90s, programmers realised that they had better start taking the problem seriously.

And it was a very serious problem – not just one of having to recalculate the interest on millions of bank accounts. When a computer is programmed to assume the year is 19xx, that would mean that when the clock ticked over at the end of 1999, computers would think it was 1900. If a computer finds it is finishing an operation 100 years before it started, that’s an illogical instruction - like dividing by zero - and illogical instructions can cause crashes. That is where the danger lay. It wasn’t that people would get parking tickets for -100 years, it was that computers that controlled vital services may suddenly lock up. Anyone capable of reading this knows that when your computer crashes, it’s usually caused by something fairly trivial but you still lose everything else you were doing. So while your last crash may have been caused by that Cool Web Search toolbar that you didn’t realise you’d installed, that also caused you to lose the essay you were writing at the time, the email you were reading and the card game you were playing. Likewise, an illogical instruction caused by the absence of two little digits had the potential for knock-on effects that could have been disastrous in some cases.

As we all know, none of the predicted doom came to pass. That’s not because the threat was overstated. It’s because we dealt with it. Yes, pat yourself on the back humanity! For once, we actually saw a crisis coming and managed to avert it without mass devastation.

And because we managed to avoid disaster, the conventional wisdom is that there was never a threat to begin with and we were all worried about nothing. That’s the premise of the chapter in History’s Worst Decisions, because the decision it’s talking about is not the decision to leave the two digits out but the decision to do something about it. It lists the motivation as ‘greed,’ the culprit as ‘most of the western world,’ and the damage done as ‘hundreds of billions of pounds in wasted effort and stress.’ I don’t know where the authors get that absurdly round figure from but you can’t say the effort was wasted when it clearly worked. It’s one case where the experts are victims of their own success. Perhaps if we’d had a bit more chaos, people would be satisfied that there was a serious problem to be dealt with.

Much of the rest of the article focuses on the alarmist book, Time Bomb 2000 by Edward and Jennifer Yourden – a pretty easy target. Of course it’s true that there was some ridiculous hype over Y2K, with people preparing to go back to the pre-industrial age, but that doesn’t mean the threat was non-existent. The reality is that there’s a small minority of the population that secretly relishes the idea of stockpiling ten years’ worth of tinned food and bullets and taking to the hills. For them, any excuse will do, whether it’s nuclear war, Y2K or a Democratic president. The only thing they haven’t used as a pretext for indulging their survivalist fetish is climate change, which I find curious because it’s the kind of thing that should be right up their alley.

Whether the Yourdens’ book was an honest warning or shameless profiteering from hype, it’s right to look upon it as a quaint and amusing relic these days. But it should also be recognised that the absence of any calamities due to Y2K shows what can be done when we listen to the science, free from political and business agendas. In the increasingly unlikely event that we manage to avoid serious upheaval from climate change, “sceptics” will point to that success as evidence that that threat never existed either. No good deed goes unpunished.


Update: I'm happy to learn that not everyone has adopted the assumption that there was nothing to Y2K and that those who warned of it are getting due recognition. I received an email this morning with the following link:
http://lifeboat.com/ex/guardian2009