Category: Technology

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The Get Lost Button

Recently, I added a group of photos to my Facebook Page.  Facebook popped up with a little window that hid part of my screen and urged me to make my album “shareable” so my friends could post pictures to it as well.  And Facebook, of course, gets to collect more information about my friends.  Your options are “yes” or leave this ugly window open on my screen.

Facebook should add another option: GET LOST.

Come to think of it, most software and websites should have that as a standard option.

Put all your music into my library so you have to use my app to find it? GET LOST.

Update Firefox so you have to wait five minutes before you can google whatever it is you’ve forgotten you want to google? GET LOST.

Install a new layer on your browser so I can intercept all your search requests? GET LOST.

Update your Flash Player with the newest, most secure, sexiest and fastest new Updater?  GET LOST.

Sign in to Google?  GET LOST.

Let us update you when new features are available?  GET LOST.

Sign in to watch videos your friends liked on Facebook?  GET LOST.

It is now 2013: I still use Word 2003.  Why?  Because, for one thing, I want to write.  I don’t want to create a Christmas Card every time I develop some actual content.

Below, the Word 2003 and Word 2010 screens, respectively.

 

 

Going back to Office 2003.

Office 2007 and 2010 must be the worst design updates in software history.

Would Mighty Microsoft really make a mistake like that? Wouldn’t they carefully test the new interface to make sure users liked it and found it more efficient and user-friendly? Oh, they probably do, to some extent. But that’s not the driving force behind most upgrades.

Every four or five years, Microsoft must persuade you to upgrade or they lose a massive income stream. To persuade you to upgrade, they must make it difficult to run older versions of the software on the new operating systems that come with all new computers. Then they must persuade you that there is something new and better about the upgrade.

In every design aspect of any product there will be a point where an optimum design has been reached beyond which only minor tweaks and enhancements will actually provide anything of value. Office seemed to me to have reached that plateau at version 2003. The tool bar on the new version is a mess.

But then, Microsoft never cared at all for the power user. The very last thing they, or Adobe, or Sony, want to give the user is the power to control his computer environment. They don’t want you to know where your files are actually located, or where your templates are, or how to turn useless automated features off. They want you to enter the womb, attach the umbilical cord, and keep funneling those dollars into their coffers while you are desperately dependent on them to maintain the web of fonts and links and chains and networks that let you find your file.

There is no such thing as a desktop. It does not exist. There is a hard drive and a motherboard and software. The desktop itself is a fictional creation of Microsoft’s to convince you to let them manage your files, which it then hides from you in folders you can’t locate and can’t efficiently back up.

And if the computer is “My Computer” why is Microsoft trying to shove it’s bizarre file organization ideas down my throat? Why does it allow applications to store configuration files not only in the Program Files\application\whatever folder but also in the users\username\app data or app data\roaming folders? So if you fix a bad dll you might not know it: a duplicate dll might very well be sitting in another folder somewhere. This happened to me recently: I spent hours trying to solve a problem only to realize that there were two copies of the same file in two different sub-sub-sub-folders, and I was fixing the wrong one.

After all this time, and more than 15 years after the atrocious Windows 3.1 debuted, Microsoft still sucks.

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Chinese Hackers

“I don’t need to kill you to get what I want.”

We read that Chinese hackers, once again, are poking around on U.S. government and corporate servers and stealing important data files related to national defense and patented inventions.

I am perplexed. As a computer professional, and a database specialist, I always immediately ask myself how they got in? And then I ask myself, how would I manage a data set that required a very, very high degree of security?

The answer is pretty simple. You don’t expose data like that to an external network.

In the simplest form, this kind of security can be implemented very easily. You locate the files, the applications, the data bases, configurations, libraries, code, whatever, on a local network. You don’t connect it to the internet. All the people working on your project have to be located within your physical network, that is, one or more buildings physically connected by network cable, and not connected to any external modem or line, and certainly without a wireless connection.

I would guess that, from the point of view of industry or government, this might be unacceptable in some way. Anyone working on almost any information technology would need to access the internet often. But what is “unacceptable”? Is opening your information systems to Chinese hackers “acceptable”?

How quickly could we get used to a new acceptable: when you work on a very important project that requires a high level of security, you get off the grid. That’s the way it is. The same way that scientists working in micro bacterial research now have to wear white suits, visors, and gloves and work in sealed rooms, in secure buildings.

I think it can be done. Inevitably, some scientists or engineers will need some information only available on the internet but that can easily be handled by having a physically isolated internet connection to a separate, non-networked computer in the same building. It’s not technically difficult to keep it separate from a LAN. If the information is copied or downloaded, it can be copied onto a flash drive and then transferred to the LAN. Then, even if an employee inadvertently downloaded a virus from the internet, it would have no effect. It won’t be able to connect to a mother ship. The flash drive could be reformatted before ever being used again for extra security. What’s so hard about that?

[It might be argued that all computers nowadays come with built-in wireless connectivity.  But it is possible to build computers without it if there was a demand for it.]

I know: the engineers and scientists will insist they need immediate, continuous access to the internet. If you insist, and the government or industry accedes to this demand, they should quit whining about hackers stealing the data: you have made it available to them.

If you want to rent a car and drive to Italy and park it on the street, please don’t come to me with your crisis about someone stealing your GPS out of your glove compartment– I can tell you right now, that is what will happen. If you don’t like it, go somewhere else.

We have bigger problems with China. Today, the “Inside Washington” program with Gordon Peterson and gang decried the fact that the U.S. is not preparing for war with China. Even Mark Shields seemed to believe we should not be conducting war exercises with China while they are trying to steal our data.

I think he’s wrong. I think that is precisely what we should be doing: engaging China, developing relationships, sharing knowledge with them. If you prepare for war, you will have war. If you prepare for peace, you might not.

The great problem with China is caused by us. Walmart, especially, uses China as a vast pool of cheap labour to produce millions of trinkets to be sold cheaply at the mall outside of your town, thereby driving local businesses out of business and driving more and more American workers into minimum wage jobs supporting the dispersal of the products of Chinese productivity and providing the capital China needs to build a navy that can challenge the navy of the country they expect some day to go to war with, the United States. Apple has found a congenial home in China. All the big American corporations are drooling at the possibilities of a billion new customers. That is what drives U.S. foreign policy and anyone who pretends otherwise is running for president.

If you don’t want China to become big and powerful and rich, you will cut Walmart off at the knees. Walmart will then shift their production to Bangladesh or India or Mexico. Maybe a few jobs will come back to America.

Because both sides know two things. Firstly, there is not enough oil in the world for both the U.S. and a future China when it begins to catch up to American industrial might. Secondly, neither country has the moral or rational ability to say: let’s share.

And Furthermore…

If you don’t like the Internet, get off. I mean it. Who asked you on? Who the hell insisted that corporations should be able to store their data on public networks, advertise their products, and sell their services, online? Get off. Lock your LAN up. Disconnect. Use the telephone instead. Use the courier. Fax your information. Send it by carrier pigeon.

There is no divine ordinance that says that governments and corporations must be allowed to store their data on the internet and should expect that information to be secure.

Get off, get off, get off.

One More Thing

I just think I need to take a moment and remind everyone that Wolf Bitzer at CNN said this about Sarah Palin’s acceptance speech: “She hit one out of the park.”

Let’s not forget.

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The Disappointment of Free Enterprise Healthcare

What an unfortunate result! The Americans, alone in the Western World, decided to boldly embrace an alternative model of health care: free enterprise. There is no government plan, and very little government regulation. In theory, we were told, this would reduce the costs of health care because competition among doctors and hospitals would drive costs down.

It has had the opposite effect. The U.S. has the most expensive health care system in the Western World, and the worst results.

I am genuinely disappointed.  Look at the computer industry, and related technologies:  the bang for your buck has grown astronomically since the first PCs entered the market in 1981.  Today, you get fabulous technology, lavish memory, incredible capabilities, for a fraction of the cost.

Medical care, on the other hand, is absolutely through the roof.

It is also, to be fair, more effective– look at cancer deaths.

Doctors and hospitals, of course, don’t compete.  Just imagine if you had to take your broken computer somewhere and nobody would tell you what it was going to cost to repair, and may not even tell you what repairs are going to be done.  You will get a bill for $40,000.

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The Police Industrial Complex

I love PBS, and I like many episodes of Nova, but the May 29th Episode (2013) entitled “Manhunt – Boston Bombers” was a long, horny, love letter to new, expensive computer technologies, that look absolutely amazing but accomplish very little. And while Nova kind of admitted that, it still acted as if it kind of believed that running infrared scanners from a helicopter will one day help them catch terrorists, or that face recognition software will be able to look at a street video image and match it to a known criminal.

The face recognition software, conceptually at least, has some promise, but it should never be regarded as “proof” of anything for now: it’s an investigative tool. It’s not all that reliable, but it might be helpful for identifying people in a picture. Whenever you hear someone admit that they had to “enhance” the photo (while trying to make it sound magical), beware.

The infrared helicopter camera was just plain silly. The Boston police tried to argue that it helped them find Dzhokhar Tsarnaev hiding in the boat. Nova  extended a generous segment of rapturous adulation for the system, an advertisement, in fact, and allowed the police to suggest– not directly, but strongly– that Tsarnaev was found by the system. In fact, we know that a citizen saw him in the boat, and even looked into the boat and made eye contact, and then called the police. The police arrived and some idiot– on the police side– fired a gun– which caused all the courageous police officers to open fire, shooting madly in the vague direction of “something happened let’s shoot it” (it is a miracle no bystanders were killed), until Tsarnaev, completely unarmed, finally– equally miraculously– emerged from the boat to surrender, probably because there was no more room in the boat with all the lead the police had dropped into it.

Nevertheless, the police, and the media, reported an “intense firefight”.

Every time someone defends the police and I am tempted to acknowledge, yes, some police do good work, I think about stories about shit like this and pull back.

A day before, the police had cornered the suspects in a Mercedes SUV. No one, so far, has explained how the huge number of police surrounding the vehicle nevertheless allowed Dzhokhar to drive off, stop about a mile away, leave the vehicle and disappear. No doubt the police will erect monuments to their work somewhere near here. There will be a movie with the Tsarnaev brothers shown to have superhuman powers. But only one cop, we will learn, who broke the rules and ignored regulations, was able to subdue him.

In fact, the Nova episode, in spite of all the gee whiz demonstrations of new technology, made a convincing case for more police boots on the ground — if they could learn to restrain their weapons– and an alert citizenry, as the best defense against any criminality.

Those helicopters cost a fortune, about $3 million.  The infrared scanners cost about  $300,000.

The City of Toronto, rationally, decided, a few years ago, that the cost was not justified. The police, like little boys deprived of a new toy, whined about how they would never be able to catch any criminals any more.

The face recognition software is fated to be used by Republicans to scan protesters at their conventions.

Did You Know

This website has the balls to blatantly suggest that the thermal cameras found Dzhokhar Tsarnaev hiding in the boat.  That is an outright lie.  It is interesting, though, that you see this story circulating.  Do the police mind that people believe expensive useless technologies with a high cool factor help them with police work?

Thermal Camera: $300,000

Manhunt – Boston Bombers

Do we live in a Surveillance State?

Yes we do.

Is it constitutional to contract out intelligence services?

I don’t think so and I want it on the record here and now so that, in twenty years, when it finally reaches the Supreme Court, I can say I was right.

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Quick Easy Money

It must be an easy way for smart people to make a LOT of money.

There is a man who detects and removes bedbugs for you in New York.  He says that 80% of his customers do not have bedbugs.  He is always busy.  No matter what the economy is doing, people will call about suspected bedbugs and in most cases his job is easy: do some ritual cleansing and then announce that there are no bedbugs.   You can make a lot of money doing that.

You do have to be intelligent smart. Not smart smart, like Vint Cerf. More shrewd smart, like Bill Gates. You start a firm that specializes in “cyber-security”. Ok, you are half way there because almost nobody understands what cyber-security is or how it works. Even better– since there may not be as much of a threat out there as people generally think there is, it will be hard for anyone to prove that you aren’t successful at it.

I call it the “gravity market”. You sell people a service to keep the objects they own from floating up into outer space. You can offer lavish guarantees.

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The Absurdity of PDFs

I’m waiting for someone to introduce a file format that can’t be edited or altered. Like the PDF used to be.

And then I would give it a month before someone offers a program that will edit or alter that file format.

And two years before the company that created the format will offer software to edit and alter it. It’s like anti-anti-anti-missiles. Eventually you realize that you are paying for software to create a file format that can’t be edited so you can buy software to edit it.

Afterthought

Bell Telephone will, for a few dollars a month, NOT publish your phone number in a phone book. Isn’t that nice of them? But, for a few dollars more, you can have your phone show the caller id of unlisted numbers. That’s even nicer.

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Foxconn

“We shouldn’t be criticized for using Chinese workers,” a current Apple executive said. “The U.S. has stopped producing people with the skills we need.” Ny Times, 2012-01-21

I couldn’t get over that quote: The U.S. has stopped producing people with the skills we need. Oh woeful day– America doesn’t even educate it’s own people properly and they can’t keep up with those backward Chinese.

Apple computer, selling itself to us as the totemic object of enlightened consumerist fantasy… but we aren’t the kind of people who can produce these objects. The Chinese are out there feeding us, suckling America, clasping the American consumer to it’s massive breast…. and guzzling American dollars and jobs in the process.

Is your iPhone made by slave labour? And if it was, would it actually be possible for you to own a other electronic communications device– say, an Android phone– that was not manufactured under somewhat odious conditions somewhere in China?

It has been estimated that an iPhone would cost about $65 more if it were assembled in the U.S. Would American consumers be willing to pay about 10% more for a product if it produced thousands of good-paying jobs in America instead of China? I think they probably would, right now. But nobody is campaigning on that strategy. And probably rightfully so– a trade war would not be helpful to anyone.

Foxconn is a very, very large company. It is actually owned by the Hon Hai Precision Industry Company based in Taiwan. I’ll bet you’ve never heard of it. It is the world’s largest producer of electronic devices.

All those U.S. dollars flowing to China to pay for the iPhones and iPads and Acer laptops, etc., etc. ,etc… what will they do with all those American dollars? Nobody really seems to know. Whenever I see an article on the subject, I read it, but I still can’t figure out what people think is likely to happen eventually. Keep in mind, that China is now increasingly competitive with the U.S. in one other area: guzzling oil.

Wiki on Foxconn.

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Al Gore’s Initiative

Can we settle this for once and for all?

It’s damn infuriating to see smug conservatives continue to trot out this old canard whenever they get the chance: Mitt Romney has been going around claiming that Al Gore “took credit” for the Internet. Well, it’s all politics, but the next time Romney looks in the mirror I wonder if he sees the liar that I see when he pulls shit like that.

Al Gore did not claim he “invented” the internet. He said he “took the initiative” in the creation of the internet. Apparently, it seems to shock many people that anyone was “involved” in the creation of such a massively important and successful project.   Do people think it was always there? Do they think it was created by private companies?

Look it up. Even better, here it is, from Wikipedia:

First, the actual original quote from Gore, from a March 9, 1999 interview with Wolf Blitzer on CNN:

I’ll be offering my vision when my campaign begins. And it will be comprehensive and sweeping. And I hope that it will be compelling enough to draw people toward it. I feel that it will be. But it will emerge from my dialogue with the American people. I’ve traveled to every part of this country during the last six years. During my service in the United States Congress, I took the initiative in creating the Internet. I took the initiative in moving forward a whole range of initiatives that have proven to be important to our country’s economic growth and environmental protection, improvements in our educational system.[105]

Yes, he could have phrased it better, but what he actually said– as opposed to the deliberate misquote making the rounds– was true:

Internet pioneers Vint Cerf and Bob Kahn noted that, “as far back as the 1970s, Congressman Gore promoted the idea of high speed telecommunications as an engine for both economic growth and the improvement of our educational system. He was the first elected official to grasp the potential of computer communications to have a broader impact than just improving the conduct of science and scholarship […] the Internet, as we know it today, was not deployed until 1983. When the Internet was still in the early stages of its deployment, Congressman Gore provided intellectual leadership by helping create the vision of the potential benefits of high speed computing and communication.”[53]

So Al Gore was not just on the congressional committee that oversaw the creation of the internet: he played a leadership role on the issue.

Even Newt Gingrich acknowledged as much.

And let’s not forget that Gore served honorably in Viet Nam. Can you name a single Republican running in this election who did? Come on– try it.

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Cell Phone Service Rip Off

 

All Contents Copyright © Bill Van Dyk
2011 All Rights Reserved

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The Sentinelese: Leave us Alone

The Sentinelese live on an island at the west-ward tip of the Great Andaman Archipelago, which is in the Bay of Bengal, due east from India. You do not want to visit this place.

They don’t want us and they won’t have us. It is rather shocking to read, in this day and age, that there is yet an aboriginal culture that resists homogenization. Homogenization? They don’t even want to get to know us. When a pair of fisherman inadvertently drifted into their waters, the Sentinelese killed them. A helicopter was sent to retrieve their bodies: the Sentinelese drove it off with bows and arrows. Go away. The bodies remain unrecovered.

I find the existence of the Sentinelese reassuring. I don’t like the thought of travelling to the most obscure, distant corner of the earth, slashing my way through dense jungle, climbing through volcanic rock and vale, only to come upon a native child wearing a Nike swoosh and listening to music on his headphones, watching survivor on his portable satellite TV. The Sentinelese, surprisingly, don’t want any contact with our culture. Even more surprising is the fact that India, which has nominal control over the islands, has chosen not to press the point. This is in utter defiance of the sad, long history of encounters between different cultures, one of which is powerful and rich. Usually, we want to kill and enslave them.

They tried. They left gifts of cocoanuts. The Sentinelse accepted the gifts and refused to act grateful.

It was when they killed the fishermen and drove off the helicopter that the Indian government decided it was best to leave them alone. I think they should get some kind of big international prize for this decision.

They don’t want our medicine, our appliances, our toys, not even our agriculture (they fish and harvest native fruits from trees). They don’t want us to enlighten or frighten or amuse or confuse them.

They want to be left in peace.