Posts with tag "internet"

Tech Geeks don’t get the real world users

Why don't users listen to us?? I love reading comments on technology oriented blogs especially when they start espousing how it should be, how it is in their homes or how Microsoft is screwing up everything they touch. Yup techies, especially those with years of experience under their belt are a fountain of knowledge and are more than willing to share it whether it is through exhaustive blog posts, or in the comments to those blog posts.

Today I was reading a post by engtech when my eye caught a couple of links to older posts by Jeff Atwood at Coding Horror where he talks at length about the self-interest of anti virus companies and how with proper care and attention; along with some funky software options like virtualization, antivirus programs were unnecessary. As interesting as the post was in itself the comments that followed it proved to be just as interesting; if not more so.

Now I’ve posted before on my feelings about how I think AV companies are no better than snake oil salesmen but I am also realistic enough to know that for the real world computer user and their families not having an AV installed turns their computer into a ticking time bomb.

It is things like this that perfectly illustrate; to me at least, how tech knowledgeable people have gotten to the point where they have lost sight of the reality of the larger world of real computer users. To assume that everyone will know; or even give a shit, what virtualization is in the first place let alone go to all the trouble of installing it and using things like VMware is a fool’s assumption. It’s hard enough to get them not to click on stupid ass email attachments from people that may or may not know.

I can’t even remember the number of machines that I have seen that have had AV software turned off, AV subscriptions so out of date as to be totally useless or even firewalls disabled because they didn’t like all those popup dialogs showing up all the time. These are the people you want to learn to make image backups or not click on that attachment from Aunt Mable or to fire up a virtual version of their OS so they can play WoW – give your head a shake.

Why do you think botnets are ravaging our systems. Why do you think that Sony wasn’t concerned about their rootkit DRM scheme. The reason things like this proliferate is because the real world user doesn’t give a shit past being able to download music where ever they can, surf for porn and clicking on any button just to get rid of those popups. Things like that succeed because normal everyday folks are using tools they don’t have the faintest clue about; and probably for the most part don’t care to learn anything about.

The crackers, phishers and other assorted script kiddies are playing a game of averages and as with Las Vegas casinos the law of averages is always in their favor. It’s in their favor because there are more real world computer users out there than there are geeks; and that isn’t like to ever change.

So for as much as those of us that work with computers in one fashion or another day in and day out like to think we have all the answers the fact is it doesn’t matter if we do or not. The fact is that as much as we would like to think we know how the computer world works the truth of the matter is that as long as we refuse to think like those real world computer users – especially when developing software – no amount of self-righteous chest beating of how things should be done will make one bit of difference.


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The Internet Hippie Mindset

Is it any different now? My early youth came at the very tail end of the whole hippie culture where it was all about sticking it to the man and everyone wanted to be a free soul who didn’t care what people thought about them or what they did. As in all things though reality sets in. For the vast majority of the hippie generation this meant having to join the very culture that they had railed against all the while hoping that there was nothing out there that could come back to haunt them; or endanger their new lives.

I was reminded of this when I read a post today by Steve Clayton where he said:

Led by Generation Y, who seems carefree about sharing their lives on the web, I suspect many of us are opening up what we may have previously guarded in a rush to stay in the vanguard of technology.

The generations maybe totally different but the attitude about not caring what people think or about what you say is no different. Today we have replaced the commune with the social network and instead of putting flowers in gun barrels for the benefit of photographers we put our lives up on YouTube. We marched through the streets to do battle with the police as we protested against the establishment, now we join MoveOn.org and let our fingers march across our keyboards as we fill our blogs with thoughts and opinions.

Then Madison Avenue discovered it could make fortunes from this hippie culture and it became a marketable commodity, now VC’s and corporations have discovered this new generation of electronic hippies and have made it a commodity.

We are a society that has forever lived in cycles of history only the generations and the technology is different – will this time be any different?


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The browser platform – a security nightmare

Web 2.0 a security snake oil salesman's dream A couple of days ago I wrote a post about how I thought the whole idea of relying on web based applications was a bad one; but the one area I didn’t get into was the insanity of relying on things like that due to the whole issue of security. Not just the security of the browser itself but also the fact that web application and service providers are more more interested in pumping out fresh betas of their crap than they are about doing it within a secure framework.

It doesn’t matter how you shake it out or how often you you say the contrary the basic fact is that web browsers are insecure. There isn’t a day almost that doesn’t go by where you don’t hear about some exploit or a phishing scheme or the need to apply a security patch of one type or another. While Firefox would like everyone to believe otherwise they have had their fair share of attacks just like Internet Explorer.

Along with this we hear of social networks being hacked and data of millions of users being stolen either by hackers or more likely company employee’s who have become either greedy or dissatisfied. For every case we do hear about we have also been told that we can assume that there is probably double the number of cases that aren’t reported.

Whether it be basic browser insecurity or just plain corporate incompetence the idea that this is the platform which we are being asked increasing to trust with our data is incredulous. Yet we fall for the empty guarantees of data security and equally empty promises of protecting our personal information and for what …. free web based software and services?

I am sure that the millions and millions TJX customers who had their data stolen feel much better because we have free web applications. I am sure that all the indie bands are jumping for joy knowing that caring corporations are protecting their data as they go about trying to rescue their MySpace sites that have been hacked and being told – …sorry but you are shit out of luck however give us a call when you are as famous as Alicia Keys …”

The idea that we are increasingly allowing web companies to handle everything from our financial data to soon our personal health details when they can’t even keep their own data safe just amazes me – but hey you’re getting free stuff right?

As long as we continue to believe that it is safe to transmit sensitive personal information via the web browser, or continue to let web companies store and do what they want with our data all on the promise of being able to use free software then we are only fooling ourselves that the web and web browsers are a secure platform.

The fact is that for Web 2.0 companies it is all about making the money however they can and if the process they lose some data, have user pages hacked it is all part of the price to pay for making all that advertising or VC dollars. For more traditional corporations the bean counters rule that losing millions of user account information is acceptable compared to the cost of securing; and maintaining security, on all that data in the first place.

In the end it all boils down to making the most profit with the least amount of cost and providing secure web application and web browser platform just isn’t worth the cost.

[graphic original - hugh macleod]


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So where is that broadband bottleneck

I know there is a kink in the Interpipes somewhere Much of the world is seeing an increases in broadband speed being delivered to their homes but in the US surfers are lucky if they see any kind of speed approaching 8Mbits per second. So while places like Singapore and other Eastern countries and a growing number in Europe are getting to play around with access approaching 40Mbits/sec or more we find ourselves having our wallets raped for the so-called top of the line broadband.

That said though is this delivery to the home of true broadband where the bottleneck to real broadband adoption in North America is happening. Would even having speeds of 40Mbits/sec matter or make surfing the web any faster?

Well, according to a post on GigaOM it may actually not make one bit of difference when you take into account that a large percentage of web sites probably aren’t even setup to deliver their content; whether it be page display, video/audio streaming or file downloading at true broadband speeds. As Om Malik points out in his article:

The applications of today are clearly optimized for our 3-to-6 megabits per second connections. From Facebook to MySpace to YouTube ? they all work well on what passes for broadband in the US and Europe. Guziewicz pointed out that despite higher speeds, the usage behavior hadn?t really changed.

For all our bitching of being bled dry by broadband providers it doesn’t really matter because a large majority of those sites we visit can’t even get access to the speeds needed to deliver content at true broadband speeds; unless of course they can fork over prohibitive amounts of money – because everything is available for the right price.

So while the big broadband providers are banking billions in profits we get to stumble along like little children. Providers spend more time trying to find more and more ways to lock us down while threatening to charge more money or double dipping by suggesting that content providers pay a surcharge for access to the same lines that providers are already being paid for by use the users.

It all boils down to corporate and shareholder greed with us the users getting shafted where ever possible.


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Cuban say the Internet is boring – here’s why

It's all money in the bank for the least amount of work I had first skipped over Mark Cuban’s newest post today when I saw it listed on TechMeme and the headline struck me as nothing than link bait and just a rehash of all the other hype about the demise of the Internet. Then I noticed Dan Dodge’s take on the post so turned around and went back to the source.

As Dan pointed out Mark’s headline was just a bit misleading because the main part of his point was that the Internet has now become a utility – something that we have come to expect as a normal part of our daily lives. What he was trying to point out; and which Dan agreed with him on is it isn’t that the Internet is dead but more that it is become a stagnant playground where the new and the exciting come to play.

Mark feels that this is directly attributed to the lack of real growth in the adoption and availability of broadband. While many of us might feel that our current meg per second rates are enough; which by the way I don’t, both Mark and Dan believe that until broadband to the home even closely resembles what is available on the backbone true innovation and exciting new uses won’t happen.

I agree with both of them and while neither of them come out and say why North American broadband lags behind even countries in the Far East or Europe I will because it is simple.

Corporate greed … and yes it is as simple as that.

Telecom and cable companies have no interest in providing faster services; because while it may be better for the users and spur incredible innovations they are quite happy playing games of semantics making the users believe they are getting the best speeds available.

After all why go to all the trouble of improving the service when people are happy to pay out what they already are for a mediocre service. Why deal with the added expenses when they don’t have to and as it is they are adding billions of dollars to their profits – so what is providing better service going to do to benefit them.

They would rather threaten Google and others with traffic shaping and spend millions on fighting against network neutrality because that will return them a better profit margin than providing their customers with better and faster service.

So yes the Internet is stagnating .. it’s stopped moving forward in the true sense of the word; regardless of what the Web 2.0 crowd would have us believe, and it all boils down to easy money for the least amount of service.

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Twitter – the useful and the useless

Hitching a ride on the new communication medium I’ve been following Chris Brogan the past little while and reading his posts about what I would call his Making yourself available to ideas chain of thought that he is sharing with us all. Part of his repertoire of tools that he is using is Twitter – that now ubiquitous presence tool.

This got me thinking about how the community in general; and myself in particular, use this medium. Now when I first started using Twitter it was primarily because I wrote TwitBox; my Windows client for the service, and I wanted to be able to communicate with the program’s userbase. Between first signing up for Twitter and now I have been ambivalent about this whole presence thing. There have been days that I haven’t even bothered to fire up TwitBox to see what was going on.

Now Chris advocates using Twitter as part of your overall strategy of making yourself available on the web; but there are some days that I wonder about this whole presence thing and in turn any real value of stuff like Twitter. Many days it doesn’t even reach the 50% level of usefulness – rather it is filled with mundane crap I couldn’t careless about.

On the flip side there days when it can be a goldmine of reference points … tips that can lead you down new roads of learning. So do these occasional little gems make it worthwhile and is it really a matter of – as Chris suggests – making good choices of who you want to follow.

I think it is definitely a combination of both and given that even now Twitter is still a new communication medium it is something we are still learning how to best use without ruining it. That said I thought I would list; in no particular order, some of the things I like and dislike about Twitter.

  1. I don’t like – or need to know – what the hell you are eating.
  2. It is a great way to find new information source
  3. It is a good way to keep in contact with friends and family – especially for those that hate writing email or even snail mail
  4. I don’t care what your daily schedule is
  5. I don’t need to know what you are doing every minute of the day
  6. I really don’t need to know if you have just written the greatest post in the blogosphere as chances are if I am following you I already subscribe to your blog’s feed
  7. I really want to hear if you have read a great post
  8. I do want to hear if you have a great idea or have heard one

Right now I think Twitter is still going through its growing phase and we are all learning how best to use what could potentially be a great instantaneous idea sharing medium. At this point though I find it is bogged down in more of the useless mundane crap than it is a useful medium.

Maybe like Chris suggests – it is time to be more selective about the people you want to follow …. time to find the thinkers and skip the boring.


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The Internet – R.I.P.

The Internet - it was nice knowing you. Of all the accidental creations that have happened during our recorded time on this planet the Internet has to rank as one of the most fantastic. Sure some would argue that it has done nothing to enhance our social values or strengthen us as human beings – in fact they would suggest that it has done nothing but provide a breeding ground for all that is evil in our society. As delusional as I might think these people might be this is not where I want to go.

No .. I want to say good bye to the Internet … to hold a good old fashion New Orleans burial procession followed by the best Irish wake we can put together. Let the food and drink flow as we reminisce about a time that is now gone for good. A time before the Googlization of our lives and work. A time when bringing something to life on the web was more than pandering for Google dollars.

The Internet that we have today has become simply a breeding ground of copycat business modelless start-ups whose whole objective is nothing more than to play round robin with Google, Microsoft and Yahoo! There no longer seems to be any pride in creating something and living with it. The very idea of running anything on the web as a small family business is gone – replaced with new-age web software factories churning out food for the monoliths of the web.

The price tags get bigger and the acquisition targets come from an ever widening field of corporate cattle drooling over the very idea of million and billion dollar pay-outs. Even rumors of Microsoft buying Yahoo! abounded with everyone wringing their hands at what such a union would bring. I wonder though if the same hand wringing would occur if Google was the one rumored to be the buyer; or how about – well – anyone but Microsoft.

We are headed to a two; possibly three if one looks for a dark horse called NewsCorp, corporate internet and it doesn’t matter how much peanut butter you pile on – Yahoo! won’t be one of them. In my opinion it’s days are numbered and in the very near future a new billion dollar record will be set (and don’t be surprised if NewsCorp is the one to open the checkbook).

Within five years – and no more than ten – we will look back on this time of our Internet childhood with fond memories and questions of why we let our creation be gobbled up like nothing more than a turkey at Thanksgiving dinner. After all it is us that made the web – we gave it life with every line of HTML and click of a hyperlink but now we have corporations fighting over patents that have no place in our creation, we have monoliths deciding how and were our information will be stored and used.

The Internet was born out of the desire to freely share information and now we stand idly by as it get’s locked behind the iron walls of billion dollar corporations using the shell game of doing no evil as they drive fancy cars paid for with advertising dollars. We gave birth to the Internet and now we stand at the graveside throwing roses not realizing what we are losing.

Yes the Internet will always be there but it will be never be the Internet it could have been.

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I am so hooked

Sanctuary - Sci-Fi weblivison And it’s only the trailer … If you like sci-fi then I am almost 100% sure you will like Sanctuary – but here’s the kicker. It’s strictly available on the web and it looks like their going to have a stand-alone player for it soon.

Now don’t fool yourself this is not some hack-kneed user generated content. From what I have seen on the trailer this is television broadcast quality and impressively so in my humble opinion. Like I said I’ve only seen the trailer so far but I am hooked – this could be so cool.

So head over to Sanctuary and get ready to add it to your bookmarks.

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