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The US Federal Trade Commission recently released a report about how online/virtual ‘worlds’ protect underage children from harmful or explicit images. They investigated the mechanisms these companies put in place to ensure that children 13 and under did not access “things they shouldn’t.”
Their first recommendation was to “…put in place more effective age verification methodology.” Well, holy shit! They cracked it! It angers me when an agency, government or not, comes up with a recommendation that is as useful as, “My plan is to come up with a plan.” A 2-year-old could have figured out that the reason why they can log into adult online ‘worlds’ is because there is no mechanism to prevent them!
But what is the solution? The fact of the matter is there is none. Just as 16-year-olds can use their sibling’s ID to get into a bar illegally, condoms are not 100% effective, and people continue to inexplicably love Two and Half Men, there is no protection that can successfully eliminate an intentional desire to do “things they shouldn’t,” except blocking out the potential altogether. In this example, that would include shutting down all bars, not having sex, and killing Charlie Sheen. Alternately, there is the the always popular ‘lock yourself in an opaque box’.
There are really two problems at play here, and neither have to do with technology.
Accidental access: While this kills my sex analogy because in my research, accidental sex isn’t that easy… You can certainly accidentally wander into a bar, a naughty website, or flick onto a tv show that shouldn’t be on the air.
Purposeful circumvention: You can purposely attempt to buy beer underage, lie about your birth date on the web or in paperwork, and tune into CBS.
Before we go any further, we will never stop number 2. As I said above, the FCC, FTC, FDA et. al. and their world wide equivalents can do all they want and spend billions of currency units, but if someone wants to do something and they can find a way, they will do it. Just as Philippe Petit (“Man on Wire”, highly recommend watching), DB Cooper, the 9/11 perpetrators, etc., etc. proved: “You can do whatever you want.” By the way, does anyone else see the irony in that guidance councillors use that phrase as a build up to young students, and then we spend government money trying to figure out ways to prevent young students from doing so?
Now in the accidental case the FTC found that even in ‘virtual worlds’ that were kid friendly, there were sexually explicit references, violence, and other “things they shouldn’t” have access too. This is nothing new, I mean go back and watch old cartoons, movies, read comic books, or walk down any street in a major city. Now stop. The reason we have to go back and re-watch the cartoons and movies, or re-read the comic books is because in most cases we were too innocent to get the joke. The reason why this next generation (who have been surfing for porn since they could double click their index finger) is growing up so fast is not because there are subtle references in their world to all of this, it is because sex, violence, drugs and the like are promoted on a daily basis to them as ‘bad’, and ‘bad’ things are intriguing! Remember?! Forget the sexually suggestive graphic in Sims online. 12-year-old girls see women in short skirts on tv or on the street and then go and buy “Cosmo: The pedophile edition” to find out why, or the 8-year-old who knows in explicit detail what a blow job is because MTV bleeps out mysterious words, so the curious mind has to go and find out why! And to add to it all, today they have the capability find out quite quickly, whereas when we were young we only had older siblings or ‘the cool aunt’.
We played cops and robbers as kids and never even put together the fact that this was violence personified. Today they play cowboys and Indians and are scolded because it is racist to portray Indians in that manner!
We try and protect kids against things they don’t understand, and they therefore want to understand it, and at an age too young to comprehend it. Instead of letting them hear the word “Fuck” and explaining that society doesn’t want them to use that word (A-whole-nother blog entry there), or letting them play with blissful ignorance without imparting our adult morals, we attempt to hide what has always been in the open and then wonder why they become more interested in it. Kids don’t need our adult constructs forced upon them. While we need to monitor their access to various things, whether it be bad TV or naughty websites, we should do this in an effort to guide them morally, not force them to learn adult life lessons at a younger and younger age.
Pretending is ingrained in us from the very beginning. As a child, we would sit Calvin & Hobbes style in a box and blast off to space, or watch the Muppet Babies invent crazy worlds and adventures, or turn a sandbox into a Jurassic playground. Imagination is one of the very components which make us human. We have the ability to invent things in our heads and seemingly make them real.
However, while imagination should be encouraged, and is quite frankly important to all aspects of science, technology, advancement etc., it also can be overdone.
As a society, there are some things which we ‘pretend’ that actually change the way we live. This can have serious consequence. But what is worse is that we pretend things that don’t make sense, just like thinking a box is a space ship and four -inch dinosaurs can terrorize our backyard…
We pretend things like people don’t swear, smoke, drink, insult each other, fight or argue. We pretend that age has something to do with abilities. In Canada you can legally consent to sex at 16, but can’t purchase a tape to watch others have sex until 18. You’re old enough to vote for the leader of our country at 18, but not mature enough to consume alcohol until 19. You can choose to purchase potentially deadly cigarettes at 16, but can’t sign a do not resuscitate until 18. We pretend that people shouldn’t die, and that when accidents occur it is always someone’s fault. We pretend we can protect society by putting in place legislation to enforce laws against people who purposely break the laws already in place.
The Canadian Women’s Hockey team, who just took gold at the 2010 Olympics, were seen after the game sharing beer and cigars on the ice once the stadium had cleared of fans. They have since come under fire, because one of their stars was just 18 and, of course, everyone below 19 doesn’t drink, therefore they were setting a bad example. On top of that smoking in a public place!? You must be joking! That is illegal in British Columbia! The problem is that every law has a purpose. For example the “No Smoking” laws were put into place to stave off second hand smoke in people who choose not to smoke. If I am at a private party where all parties consent to smoking, then why does it matter that the place was public or private? In a room the size of a 20,000-person stadium the smoke from 15 cigars would be like placing a droplet of cyanide in the ocean and calling it poisonous water… And a member of a professional hockey team having a drink before she is ‘legally’ allowed to? I’m surprised she wasn’t doing a line of coke off the naked thigh of their goalie. Just 6 days before this event, John Montgomerie (gold medallist in skeleton) walked through Whistler with a pitcher of beer in his hand, and not only wasn’t chastised, but was celebrated on CTV as “an every Canadian man.” Last time I checked drinking in the streets was still illegal.
RDS recently had a commentator make a derogatory remark about openly gay skater Johnny Weir. A gay activist group immediately filed a complaint to the CRTC and demanded an apology from RDS. But Weir himself asked, “Why?” He fully acknowledged that this is a free country and people have their opinions. It doesn’t matter if your opinion is ignorant in a free society; you are still entitled to it. People will always fight, and have ungrounded opinions. Pretending otherwise is not only foolish, but detrimental. If no one has the right to disagree with anyone else then in what way are we free?
NBC repeatedly showed the Georgian Luger in his final grave moments, finding new people and things to blame and then issued an apology when their Shaun White’s coach used a curse word (which are in themselves arbitrarily chosen and changed on a regular basis) on live television. It’s fun to pretend when people fuck up they say ‘frak’ and ‘derrnit’, but all we are doing is further perpetuating the falsehoods that are turning everyone into whining, snivelling babies when anyone does anything they don’t like.
Pretending is fun. It really is. But hell, even the Bible says we are born to sin, so even the Christian right has to agreethat watching an 18 year old have a sip of booze is expected (assuming that is a sin and not some arbitrary human-made rule) and two guys kissing is just a spec in the eyes of their God to the other 6.5 billion humans out there with the potential to lust, murder, adulter, steal, etc. Let’s stop pretending people and society are perfect and start enjoying the fact we are different and can make our own decisions as long as they have no adverse effect on others.
I am tired, absolutely tired of phrases like “only # medals” and “disappointment” and “let down”. Canada is having one of their best games ever and continue to have hopes with a week left in the games.
Last night we lost, arguably, the most anticipated single game of the Olympics and what happened? We were on the streets of Vancouver with flags, horns, spontaneous national anthem singing, chants for our country and our athletes. I have seen the Maple Leaf on clothing and body parts here that I didn’t even know you could put it on.
The Canadian public is more psyched than ever before. Stop making up useless news and report the facts. Do the country you claim to represent proud and support these athletes who deserve more respect than the millionaire entertainers in the NBA, MLB, NFL etc.
I, for one, am not only impressed by our athletes, but feel absolutely lucky to be involved in this display of undeniable patriotism that rarely peeks through in The Great White North.
I started thinking about this topic after I watched this Craig Ferguson clip:
By now we have all heard about Conan and Leno dueling it out for the sacred 11:35 slot on NBC. However, the situation brings to light something that hasn’t yet sunk in at most major corporations yet. The public is changing.
Ferguson’s hypothesis is actually quite intuitive. The youth do rule our society. The 18-49 demographic is what all advertising dollars are based on, and that is what makes the big 3 networks all of their money. What Ferguson missed, however, is that that “deification of youth” has continued, but the youth have drastically changed.
The public today want convenience. They want everything now and exactly how they want it. It started slowly with Sunday shopping, and 24 hour supermarkets. Then it grew with super stores that sell everything from perscription drugs to fresh chickens and motor oil. Pay Per View popped up and let us watch movies whenever we wanted without leaving our homes. The web started creeping in and suddenly we could monitor prices of things like flights, toys, books and more to buy when we wanted to at the price we wanted to. Then, in one of the smartest moves of the 21st century, someone put a harddrive into a VCR and PVR (TiVo) was born: So now we could watch TV when we wanted. Bittorrent made a debut about 7 years ago and made data share faster and easier. Pagers and then cellphones became ubiquitous in people of all ages: So now we were always conveniently available and could conveniently contact anyone. We became obsessed with everything being at our fingertips (There’s an app for that™). We started bitching when we were charged for Internet outside of our house, so Free WiFi became synonymous with Café. Undergrounds subways across Asia and Europe starting piping in cellphone signals. TV companies started endevours like Hulu and BBC iPlayer to satisfy the lust for anytime access. LoveFilm and NetFlix popped up so we could stop strolling to Blockbuster and the Kindle changed the way commuters read.
But in the process, what happened, almost by accident, is we started to kill traditional television. Primetime was called such because that is when most people watched tv, and while that is probably still true, it isn’t the 18-49s any more. The ’sacred youth’ are playing XBox or using MSN or any of the other things that can be used to relax our lazy asses that didn’t exist in 50’s when this all started. Prime time is becoming ‘When I Want Time’ and this is what started the demise of such shows as Arrested Development, Jericho, The Fly and probably (sadly) soon to be Chuck. The fan base was there and arguably still is, but the generation of people that watch these shows isn’t watching them when Neilsens is recording the metrics. Suddenly advertisers are saying it isn’t worth their money and the networks are are saying we need to find something better, regardless of the quality. This is why cable shows like Dexter, Six Feet Under, The Sopranos and the like became such big long lasting hits, they don’t rely on ads, because the revenue comes from the cable fees.
Conan/Leno are the same in this regard. The part most people want to see of any late night show is the monologue, and in the case of SNL, Weekend Update. So we PVR that while we watch the prime time shows that we didn’t watch between 8 and 11, then watch the first 15 minutes and hit the sack, or save them up for another time: Convenience.
Mind you, the movie, airline and music industries are much farther behind then the big 3 when it comes to accepting the new technologies, but this doesn’t stiffle the fact that every year dozens of shows go off the air before they get to 6 episodes, because their on air rating are ‘too low’. Eventually the large corporations need to start catering to the desire of convenience. The food industry made the transition years ago with frozen dinners, the microwave etc., and pre-made dinner sales are always on the rise. Eventually the other industries will need to go down this path, because, for better or for worse, this is what their customers are demanding.
WARNING: Geeks only. (Persistent Link on the left hand side)
I have been doing an excessive amount of coding lately, for both work and for personal things and I found that I use the same handful of JAVA methods in sequence to perform many tasks. Specifically around persisting/converting data.
So in an effort to make my life easier I created a series of String and File utilities that I can call to avoid having to copy/paste and adjust dozens of lines of code.
The API is generic and mostly Object agnostic. I went through and fully documented all the methods, and I also overloaded many of the methods for the base case and specific cases.
I think eventually this will be “open source” in the sense I will let people add to it, but for the time being I’ll just see if anyone actually has an interest in it.
*Although not fully tested, There is a DLL version of this API. The DLL was generated using a neat little utility called IKVM. The ability to convert JARs to DLLs is really useful!
You can run the Test Class by executing “java -jar util_api_1.0.jar”
I’m tired of reading about people ‘losing privacy’ with Facebook and Twitter. People are not losing their privacy; they are losing their common sense. There was an article this morning in the paper which cited examples of ‘loss of privacy’:
1) A UK worker being fired for comments that her job was boring.
2) Employees in a service industry being reprimanded for posting negative comments about customers on their social sites.
3) Causing of problems in relationships when one person makes relationship-based remarks, or when a person ‘updates their relationship status’ without approval of the other party.
Hold on, none of those are examples of losing privacy; they all made their opinion public on purpose. Everyone at one time or another is bored at work. Everyone complains about idiots they have to deal with, and everyone has relationship troubles. It isn’t the fact that those people had those thoughts; it is the fact that they consciously made the thought public. Consciously making something known to people is not losing privacy, losing privacy is something that you didn’t make known to people, becoming known to people. For example, having your private diary published, or your best friend write a tell-all book about you, or a doctor telling everyone about your genital herpes is a loss of privacy. Standing on a box in the middle of Times Square and screaming that you have genital herpes, or handing out free copies of your sex tapes to strangers is not a loss of privacy.
If Facebook openly released all of your pictures to the general public, not just registered Facebook users or specifically your ‘friends’, then that is an invasion, but they don’t (I didn’t say can’t). In fact, they are putting in more restrictions around what can be seen.
We live in a knowledge-starved world. We put Tiger Woods on the front page because we found out he had a secret, but then scream bloody murder when someone finds out ours. We can’t have it both ways.
The sad part is that government agencies are spending millions to study Facebook for security holes, when in reality we live in a society that cares less about privacy and more about reading about our acquaintances’ lives than ever before. If something isn’t meant to be public, don’t make it public. It is as simple of that. Posting “I’ve had a horrible day,” is enormously different than posting “I hate my boss and work is shit.” Facebook does not require the same level of professionalism as a man in a suit in front of a microphone (but then again, even Obama called Kanye a “Jackass”), but it does require some common sense.
And you want to talk about privacy? Well how about laws that restrict who you can love/marry, in what orifice you can have sex, or upcoming flight rules that you can either be photographed in an ‘naked scanner’ machine or have your genitalia juggled before you can get on an airplane? We don’t live in a private society at all when a government can invade it like that. BTW: This is for another entry, but ‘naked scanner’ is by far the newest gross exaggerated term. Given the above two options I will gladly let a couple people stare at my colourless, featureless ‘naked’ body only to have the picture removed immediately upon exiting the scanner. It’s not like Playboy is standing behind them saying “Yep, I’ll take that one for our ‘frequent flyers’ issue.” In those pictures you are no more nude than that chick’s silhouette on a trucker’s mud flaps.
This last year 3 or 4 guys got caught for misuse of a firearm and animal cruelty because they did really stupid, depraved things to a duck during a hunting trip. They got caught, not because someone discovered the duck, but because they posted themselves on YouTube doing it. Had that not happened, the ducks would have decayed or been eaten and, assuming they wouldn’t brag about it (which is a stretch based on the video), they certainly wouldn’t have been charged.
Why haven’t we learned from this? Because we are not used to a truly global media. While screaming on top of a box in Times Square all of your dirty secrets certainly isn’t maintaining privacy, it is not the same as electronically posting something that within seconds the entire world can see… Until, of course, someone starts streaming your NYC rant. Which really poses the question, do we have any privacy anymore? If anyone can video/photograph us doing anything and YouTube it, wouldn’t you think that would make everyone more afraid than the stuff they knowingly post? It sure does for me…
As we all know by now on Christmas day a man attempted to detonate an explosive on a flight as it was descending into Detroit. The media reported this almost immediately as a “terrorist attack”.
There was a Republican senator on CNN this week denouncing Obama because “…he took 3 days to respond to the attempted terrorist attack,” and “…was too busy with the war in Iraq and pushing his Healthcare agenda to care about airport security”.
Of course he fucking was! The American people elected him because that’s what he’d said he’d do! Airport security is not a political issue. Blaming Obama for a bomber boarding a plane in Amsterdam is like blaming the Queen because Royal Mail lost your package. A government owned agency failed here, not the leader of the government.
I promise you if Obama was told “Hey, man… Some Nigerian guy is gonna board an airplane in Holland with a bomb in his underpants,” he would have called someone and said “Yo, can you figure out how to stop that from, you know, like, happening?”.
Also on CNN they had a former head of the 9/11 commision on who commented that Obama was reluctant to use the word terrorism and therefore was undermining the event. I don’t care if the attacker is on a terrorist mission or a deranged girl scout who was driven to commit mass murder because of an unfortunate cookie selling incident: If a plane blows up it is a failure of the security preventing that from happening, which is exactly what Obama said it was.
World leaders don’t have a red S on their chests and fly around at night saving damsels in distress, they are human, and if you think world leaders know everything about their countries like some sort of human-embodied-omnipotent being, then your sadly mistaken. It’s just like the fiasco of the environmental conference in Denmark. Sending Stephen Harper to an environmental convention is as useful as sending Andy Dick to a vagina convention. Neither know anything about the subject, except what they are told by their peers. Let people who know science sort out the environment issues and make a global recommendation. You wouldn’t hire the CEO of Canadian Tire to fix your car right? You’d hire the mechanics who he employs to do it, because theyare the experts.
All of this is to use the media to enhance public perception, because in the end that’s what wins elections, and the Obamas/Harpers/Browns of the world all want to keep their pay cheques. Harper has to flash his smile in Denmark so that when the opposition puts their foot in their mouth for the millionth time of this parliament he can say “Well, I care about the environment, see? I saved my boarding pass!” And in the same way, even if you’ve never flown and have zero intention on doing so, having you PM or President stand up and say, “I am doing everything I can to protect you,” (whether from scary Nigerians or that pesky global warming) makes it desirable to vote for them.
The truth is, flying affects a fractionally small proportion of the population. It’s the media that portrays this as an issue of the masses and politicizes it. Restricting people from having liquids because someone once wanted to use a liquid for evil on a flight makes as much sense as making condoms out of steel because one in a few hundred break. (For more on this I suggest this article)
I am not going to die because a newly-wed couple wants to fly to the Dominican on their honeymoon, and you aren’t going to die because someone who happened to be born in Yemen is on your flight. We’re going to die because people die. I know we loving playing God, but in the end we all die. Whether a nutjob blows us up, or we have a heart attack after eating the large fries at TGIF, we will die. And for the record nutjobs come from everywhere, not just the 14 nations now on a permanent ‘frisk list’ by US order.
Flying is safe, don’t let a hypochondriac set of politicians and a fear mongering news network who couldn’t fill a day with 30 minutes of actual news change your mind about that.
Recently the file sharing site Mininova decided to stop hosting any torrent that was not sent in from a registered user with rights to the material that was being posted. It was if a million file sharers suddenly screamed and then were silenced…
With the fall of Napster, Supernova, Pirate Bay and now this I wonder the impact any of these widely publicized mini-victories has had?
The American “War on Drugs” was a late 60’s initiative and while various reports indicate drug use is down, an equal or greater number seem to report little change. Which isn’t surprising to me. If I ask any random yes or no question to any x number of people the result will likely vary from survey to survey.
It is impossible to determine the exact number of drug users for a variety of reasons. Avoiding the “since drugs being illegal, there is an apprehension about discussing their use” cliche, consider how I could go about calculating the number of smokers.
Obviously countries, and regions within those have different habits of smoking habits. If you broke down those regions based on something say like #of packs sold in a week, then determined the average number of cigarettes a smoker in that region smoked you could then calculate an estimate on the number of smokers in that region. Add all the regions up and (albeit with a fairly high margin of error), you could still get an idea of # of smokers..
There is no way to do this with illegal drugs in most of the western world. There is no idea how much of the product exists, and therefore no idea how much is sold and therefore no accurate measure of the use, or for that matter the change in use.
I am not arguing that the War on Drugs hasn’t worked, I am arguing that there is little they could do to prove it has and it has been going on since the 60s!
Assuming we know that for 40 years the government of the US (and many other countries) has put billions into fighting a war on something which we also know still exists and have no real way of measuring any affect, what does that mean in the case of Internet file sharing? Is the War on Pirated Music/Video identical to the War on Drugs?
Before every movie in the UK there is an ad with a famous person saying don’t copy this movie and there are plenty of celebrity anti-drug campaigns out there. The agencies doing the fighting have just as much propaganda available see the little bit I did on drug propaganda previously and the RIAA’s wonderful news releases on their slowly being killed industry which set a new record for profits last year.
Don’t get me wrong, I am not indicating that because music and theatres are making money this legitimises illegal actions, what I am simply putting forth is that fighting something that isn’t going to go away is like randomly waving your hand in the air with hopes it’ll hit and kill a fly.
It took 40 years to make an insignificant dent (if there is one at all) in drug use with “The War on Drugs” and its Most Wanted culprits are still in daily use. My bet is that the Internet landscape will change so vastly in the next 40 years that by the time the corporations fighting this massive swarm of file sharing website “flies” by waving lawsuit “flyswatters” randomly around the world the technology will have advanced far past today’s torrents and will become even more widespread. Their method is too much like peeing in the Atlantic Ocean: It isn’t going to change the pH level of the Pacific.
The beta of Google Wave has started, and I begged and grovelled for an invite and a friend was gracious enough to send one over. Here are my first thoughts.
Google Wave will change virtual communication. It won’t be over night, and it won’t be accepted by all, but then again Facebook was founded in 2004 and didn’t take off until 2 years later and Twitter is just finding an audience after 3 years in obscurity.
Social Networking in the virtual world is an interesting beast. While Twitter still hasn’t found a model to make decent money, and websites that collate/sort/rate/track tweets are popping up everywhere trying to be the first to make financial gain off of Mr. Dorsey’s brainchild. Facebook went from a simple and usable interface to an ad-centric model where instead of putting your friends at the top put a series of sponsored ads, tailored for you by data mining your profile. How kind. The same can be said about MSN (sic) aka Windows Live Messenger.
Since the Web has grown into a marketer’s wet dream and consumers are demanding everything for free, there seems to be a skew on the supply and demand charts. Because of that it means the newest challenge is balancing ads and ad space alongside product. And this is where Google thrives. Whether we talk about their minimalistic search engine interface (which makes Yahoo’s and MSN’s webpages look like a a 3 year old’s finger painting from the 60’s) to the subtle scrolling ads in Gmail: Google has nailed the balance of making free products while still capitalizing on the lust of web marketers.
So what does all of this have to do with Wave changing the virtual communication landscape? Wave currently is a ad-less, persistent, collaborative, realtime, multimedia, open source communication tool. I am sure the lack of ads will end coincidentally at the same time as the beta program. But the rest of my adjectives are a huge distinction from what is currently available.
At the moment products such as WebEx and Net Meeting dominate in the web conferencing space right now. While desktop sharing is a must in our international business world, what these technologies lack is the collaborative nature of a meeting. These products allow one user to display their screens, “whiteboard” and allow a basic MSNesque like text chat. While Wave lacks the desktop sharing, the ability to, in real time, share links, sites, photos, and a variety of other “gadgets” (polls are quite interesting where people can vote on any question and the tallies are immediately updated). How would this affect taking meeting notes, minutes etc? Every try to take a poll in a group chat room or over a conference call? Think about group projects in a university setting and how much easier it would be to all make decisions from the comfort of your home, in a “secure” (more notes on this later) and 100% traceable, copyable, printable way? No more will you argue over who said they’d print off the report.
Multimedia is a huge plus. How nice is it that you can add a gadget that shows a direct map to your place while you are “chatting” about directions to your place. No more need to lose a link in an accidentally closed MSN window, or having a subject less email with a static screenshot attached. And the small fact that it uses rich text. Now you can give your thoughts headings and highlight important words. Now when you copy and paste from one medium to another you won’ t get stupid bats flying in your post, or lose the spacing/formatting so you have alphabet soup on your screen. In the end this provides a clearer message to the people you are communicating with.(Did I mention inline spell checking?)
Persistence. This is a huge problem with the web in general. Say goodbye to losing a lengthy Facebook message after accidentally clicking “back” or closing your browser. Wave stores your details in realtime. If you hit the k button, not only does everyone see that you hit that button, but you can immediately close your browser without any “save” keystroke and it persists. Add to that that you can file your sessions, re-open, re-play or continue them at any time and this is the most persistent capability the web offers today. Another key to all of this is that you don’t have random MSN-style .rtf files saved all over your harddrive with cryptic names like “chat with John” or “sweet cyber sex”.
Another feature is the concept of “Public Waves”. This is(*ahem* will be) the ultimate combination of mIRC, Internet forums, Message boards, CraigsList and knowledge bases. Combine the entire global community speaking on any subject in a realtime fashion with the search and storage capabilities of Google. It’ll put Yahoo Questions to shame.
And finally on my “pro’s” list, open source. Once the hardcore geeks get a hold of this (I’ve already read that the race for the first usable iPhone and Blackberry apps is on) the possibilities are endless. Put on an MSN skin that minimizes the product into a compact chat forum for just you and your friends, build it into a WebEx-like technology to combine realtime knowledge and data share with PowerPoint and desktop presentations. An infinite communication market has just been opened up!
Of course with any great technology comes the bad. At the moment security is a huge concern. Notwithstanding the recent Google problems with security; Are corporations going to trust their internal data to Google. I don’t know the answer to this question. But in the open source world, I am sure that someone can develop quite quickly a security model that addresses the concerns that will undoubtedly arise.
The current interface is clunky and unintuitive and forces you (practically) to be in a full screen mode. This isn’t useful for most of us in our multitasking culture. Again, open source to the rescue.
The tracking issue. Google is renowned, and routinely chastised, for gathering data. And while I still agree that tracking my searches is a help to me, is tracking every personal/professional conversation I have necessary? I haven’t read a lot on this topic yet, I hope to shortly, but I have to assume some level of data mining is occurring. What will this do to corporate use? It would be a stumbling block I am sure for this technology to take off on that front. For the public market? Well, 300 million people use Facebook and that site is entirely about mining data.
WebEx and Net Meeting are bloated and for no good reason. They require downloads and constant updates and still tend to be prone to errors outside of the IE world. Wave has none of these problems. The slickness of Google has yet again struck.
All in all, I 100% agree with Google’s marketing of this technology that Google Wave is what “e-mail” would have been if it was invented from scratch, and not made to mimic the existing postal system we had world wide.It took almost 3 years for Gmail to open to the general public and now it boasts 150 million users, both corporate and personal. I am very excited for the next 3 years.
Regarding the recent news of the e-mail phishing scam on Gmail, Yahoo! and Hotmail (and presumably others) my blood has been absolutely boiling over the horribly inaccurate, sensationalistic comments that are being published in all sorts of reputable newpapers!
First lets be clear: These guys are NOT hackers. They are not. At very best they are clever people who realized that you can get people that are less clever to tell you things they shouldn’t. This is not new to e-mail, Facebook, corporate logins… In fact people take advantage of less clever people all the time. 3card monte in some form has existed for centuries and continues to fool people! Yesterday and today a fake Amber Alert message has been circulating the web, thousands have been fooled into propagating a false message. Tricking people is not the same as hacking. mafiaboy is a hacker. Kevin Mitnik was a hacker (although he was never malicious and wrongfully imprisoned).
The people who did this have done nothing wrong (I assume the lawyers for the above companies will disagree)… They asked for people’s passwords and the people gave them to them, I can do that right now: Please send me your passwords… In fact post them directly below this entry so that everyone can see them…. Sure they set up a fancy phishing site and sure they claimed to be someone they aren’t, but that is immoral, not malicious. Now, the people that use those passwords for malicious purposes are the ones breaking the law. Just as it is illegal for me to open your (snail) mail. (and yes, I concede these people could be one and the same, but it is important to distinguish that, which the media is not)
The problem, and I know I have beaten this to death, is that people seem to think technology is something new, and it isn’t. It is an adaptation of something. All technology is is an advancement of a previous incarnation of something else. Cell phones are an advancement of cordless phones, which are an advancement from corded phones, where were an enhancement on dial phones, which were an advancement on the original switchhook phones, and the cycle goes back to the first person to every tie a string between two cups. The concept and basic requirement is the same in all of these cases: I have information and I want to share it with someone who isn’t within sound wave receiving distance of my voice.
And finally, the calls for “increased security” and “more education” at these companies is absolutely preposterous. There is NO level of security or education that can prevent a person divulging personal information. How hard is it to understand “Don’t tell people your password.”? And yes, these guys used a sophisticated website to garner this information, but how is Google to prevent people from writing a webpage that looks like theirs? I mean I could mock up a Gmail page and have it be identical to it. How do you teach the mass public to make sure the website they are typing personal data into is legit? Well forward this Blog URL to 15 people and you will find out, because if you don’t you will have bad sex for the rest of your life! I mean after dozens of friends sending me hundreds of those over the past 10 years I am sure they all learned that that is a scam…
Contrary to popular belief, people do not learn from their mistakes.
The beta of Google Wave has started, and I begged and grovelled for an invite and a friend was gracious enough to send one over. Here are my first thoughts.