Tag: technology

What could go wrong?

One of the minor problems with being forced into a centralized data system is that you have to assume that the centralizer is as careful with your data as you are. Which, of course, is seldom the case:

Apple faced a major embarrassment on the eve of the launch of its new iPhone when hackers published a trove of sensitive information about 1m Apple devices online. The hacker group AntiSec, an offshoot of the Anonymous and Lulzsec collectives which last year targeted Sony, News International and others in a high-profile wave of attacks, said it had obtained the database of Apple device-identifiers from an FBI agent’s laptop.

The hackers claim this is just a sample from 12m records, which they say include the full names, street addresses and mobile phone numbers of owners of Apple’s iPhones, iPads and iPod touches. Several security researchers verified the published data are genuine, but said they present little risk to the people involved as long as the other details are not released.

Antisec should go ahead and release the whole kit and kaboodle. Perhaps the fanbois will finally learn a salient lesson concerning the wisdom of trusting Apple, Facebook, Google, or any other company attempting to utilize the walled garden model.

If you’re an Apple user who wants to find out if your device was compromised, The Next Web has created an online tool that lets you do so if you know your UDID.

Blogger and the Apple Vay

You vill have it our vay. You vill not have it your vay no more, hein? Your vay is old and schlecht. Our vay ist neu and gut and you must to use it so zat alles ist in ordnung!

The old Blogger interface will be removed in the coming days.

We’ve made many improvements to the new Blogger interface.

You can upgrade to the new interface at any time.

The thing is, I don’t want to upgrade to the new Blogger interface. I tried it. And I disliked it. So I went back to the old one, only now they are taking that option away from me. And for what? So Blogger’s engineers can feel as if they have something to do? How does forcing all their bloggers to use the new interface benefit Blogger in any way?

Now, the new interface isn’t absolutely awful, so I’m not going to drop Blogger over it, but it adds absolutely nothing as far as I’m concerned. It’s not as if I’m a Luddite, as I use the new Blogger template at Alpha Game and even tried twice – and failed twice – to use it to recreate the functionality of this blog. But I truly do not understand why so many technology companies insist on not only fixing things that are not broken, but forcing their users to adopt the “New and Improved” versions.

This is especially problematic when the forced upgrade actually breaks the product and there is no way to go back to the previous version. The last Kobo upgrade actually bricked two out of the three eReaders. Apple can get away with this sort of thing because it was run by an insane perfectionist. But I suspect disaster eventually looms for any company that forces upgrades, because it is an excellent way of creating the possibility of losing all of your customers simultaneously.

The Apple-Samsung debacle

It would appear fairly obvious that Apple’s patent infringement award will not only be appealed, but reversed and thrown out.

Apple v. Samsung juror Manuel Ilagan said the nine-person jury that heard the patent infringement case between the companies knew after the first day that it believed Samsung had wronged Apple…. The decision was very one-sided, but Ilagan said it wasn’t clear the jurors were largely in agreement until after the first day of deliberations.

“It didn’t dawn on us [that we agreed that Samsung had infringed] on the first day,” Ilagan said. “We were debating heavily, especially about the patents on bounce back and pinch-to-zoom. Apple said they owned patents, but we were debating about the prior art [about the same technology that Samsung said existed before the iPhone debuted]. [Velvin Hogan] was jury foreman. He had experience. He owned patents himself. In the beginning the debate was heated, but it was still civil. Hogan holds patents, so he took us through his experience. After that it was easier. After we debated that first patent — what was prior art –because we had a hard time believing there was no prior art, that there wasn’t something out there before Apple.

“In fact we skipped that one,” Ilagan continued, “so we could go on faster. It was bogging us down.” …

“Once you determine that Samsung violated the patents,” Ilagan said, “it’s easy to just go down those different [Samsung] products because it was all the same. Like the trade dress, once you determine Samsung violated the trade dress, the flatscreen with the Bezel…then you go down the products to see if it had a bezel. But we took our time. We didn’t rush. We had a debate before we made a decision. Sometimes it was getting heated.”

Regardless of what you think of patents or Apple, the fact that the jury didn’t even look at all the prior art should be sufficient to get a judge to look at this again. And the jury foreman sounds like an Apple plant, or at least fanboi.

Rotten to the core

In case you are wondering, not only is Apple an intrinsically evil, technofascist company, but the Apple Geniuses are even bigger tools that you likely imagined:

It was bad, and it wasn’t just a bunch of young punks working the system; the corruption rained down from above and pooled deep at the bottom.

Jake and Ronald both spoke with smiles and contempt about their former boss-of-bosses, a regional manager from Apple corporate who they allege ran the store like it was her own personal playground. Jake says the rest of the gang wasn’t much better. “It bends my brain to know that, statistically speaking, it’s harder to get a job at the Apple Store than it is to get into some Ivy League schools,” he says. “Yet somehow they’re staffed by some of the most inept people this side of mastering the ability to speak.”

I liked Apple a lot better back in the //e days.

Anklebiters will bite

Requiring real names does not reduce unwanted comments:

YouTube has joined a growing list of social media companies who think that forcing users to use their real names will make comment sections less of a trolling wasteland, but there’s surprisingly good evidence from South Korea that real name policies fail at cleaning up comments. In 2007, South Korea temporarily mandated that all websites with over 100,000 viewers require real names, but scrapped it after it was found to be ineffective at cleaning up abusive and malicious comments (the policy reduced unwanted comments by an estimated .09%).

I think some people fail to understand why I delete anonymous comments. There are two reasons. The first is that it is difficult to keep track of who is saying what when there are multiple anonymous commenters. The second is that if you can’t be bothered to take the three steps required to click Name/URL, enter a name, and click okay, the chances that you are going to say anything that requires notice are nil.

I’m not saying that it is necessary to register with anyone or provide your real name, the point is to maintain a consistent identity so that people can connect one comment with another. But that identity need not be linked to your actual identity. The ineffectivness of requiring real identities in nominal pursuit of civility is useful information, however, because it demonstrates that the real object of the campaign against Internet anonymity is something other than civility.

Women ruin everything: DEFCON edition

From atheist conferences to hacker conferences, women are complaining about them:

[E]veryone at DEFCON benefits from more women attending. Women “hackers” – in the creative technologist sense – are everywhere, and many of them are brilliant, interesting, and just plain good company (think Limor Fried, Jeri Ellsworth, and Angela Byron). Companies recruiting for talent get access to the full range of qualified applicants, not just the ones who can put up with a brogrammer atmosphere. We get more and better talks on a wider range of subjects. Conversations are more fun. Conferences and everyone at them loses when amazing women don’t attend.

When you say, “Women shouldn’t go to DEFCON if they don’t like it,” you are saying that women shouldn’t have all of the opportunities that come with attending DEFCON: jobs, education, networking, book contracts, speaking opportunities – or else should be willing to undergo sexual harassment and assault to get access to them. Is that really what you believe?

Yes. Absolutely. The conference should do everything it legally can to dissuade “amazing women” from attending. Because what this foolish woman, in her obvious ignorance of cause-and-effect, is asserting that the absolute highest priority of the conference should be that women feel comfortable. The problem is that once that principle is established, the seeds of the conference’s destruction will have been planted, because women will always find a reason to claim they are uncomfortable. No one at DEFCON would benefit in the long term from more women attending, at least not under that principle, because it only creates more opportunities for women to feel uncomfortable. Therefore, more female attendees would eventually eviscerate DEFCON as the small core of male attendees who actually make the conference valuable would stop attending as their activities increasingly infringed upon female comfort. History is very clear on the way women degrade every male institution they successfully invade that they do not succeed in destroying entirely.

Lest you think I exaggerate, consider the policy statement recommended by one of her commenters: “This conference is for everybody and everybody visiting this conference should feel comfortable, regardless of gender, sexual orientation, disability, physical appearance, body size, race, or religion.” That’s not a hacker conference policy, that’s one establishing a comfort conference. The priority defines the purpose.

And lest you think I exaggerate concerning what might be erroneously dismissed as a slippery slope argument: “These guys can rationalize until they’re blue in the face but IT IS NEVER OKAY TO GIVE A LADY THE HEEBIE JEEBIES!”

We’re not even 100 years into the great equalitarian experiment and Western civilization is already on the verge of economic and demographic collapse. This is not a coincidence. Consider that it only took 79 years for the United Kingdom to go from granting all women over the age of 21 the franchise to voluntarily surrendering its national sovereignty in the Lisbon Treaty. When the Sports Guy said “the lesson, as always, is this: women ruin everything”, he spoke nothing but the bitter truth.

Sheep for the shearing

There’s gold in them thar fools:

Orbitz Worldwide Inc. has found that people who use Apple Inc.’s Mac computers spend as much as 30% more a night on hotels, so the online travel agency is starting to show them different, and sometimes costlier, travel options than Windows visitors see. The Orbitz effort, which is in its early stages, demonstrates how tracking people’s online activities can use even seemingly innocuous information—in this case, the fact that customers are visiting Orbitz.com from a Mac—to start predicting their tastes and spending habits.

I’m going to go out on a limb here and guess that Mac users also have more debt than Windows or Linux users. Of course, one thing that Orbitz may not have learned in their research is that Mac users spend infinitely more than Linux users on hotels, since Linux users build their own shelters whenever they travel.

True science fact: there are no homeless people in America. Did you really think it was a coincidence that the standard “homeless” look is a strung-out, bearded, middle-aged white man?

Political anti-virus

I have previously described my ideas as “virulent” and it would appear that Symantec agrees, as a pair of commenters have noticed problems accessing this blog thanks to their anti-virus software:

Norton 360 AV is blocking this page as a “Fraudulent Web Page”. I had to click through the block page to get here.

Symantec earlier was blocking your site, as well as several alt-right sites, as being “fraudulent.” It wasn’t just you, it was a bunch of birds of a feather, so I suspect something fishy has been going on.

I wonder if this site-blocking may in part explain the sudden and unprecedented 12 percent drop in traffic to VP that took place starting in May 2012, which was the first month since the blog started in 2003 that the traffic didn’t increase year-on-year and seemed particularly strange in light of it being an election year. I had initially assumed the decline was the result of the switch from CoComment to Blogger comments, but it seemed like an extreme reaction, given that there was no similar drop when I made previous commenting system changes, and perhaps more importantly, there was no corresponding decline in Feedburner readers. In fact, last week marked a new Feedburner high.

Has anyone else noticed any similar problems with Symantec products and accessing ideologically transgressive web sites? I’ll shoot an email to Instapundit and perhaps he can let other bloggers know they might want to have a look at their statistics and see if they are being similarly affected. If they, too, are seeing a decline starting around the middle of May, this may be indicative of shenanigans on Symantec’s part.

Just to be clear, I don’t do any phishing or gather any data on anyone visiting here beyond what Blogger and Sitemeter record.

Apple: the cartoon villain

It’s almost as if Apple is determined to rub their evil in the face of their fanboys:

Apple was accused of ripping off consumers today as it emerged the next version of the iPhone could render all current accessories obsolete.

Outraged iPhone owners flocked online to complain about the reports that Apple has decided to radically alter the size of the connector in the next iPhone, which is expected to be launched in October.

Speakers, docks and other expensive accessories costing hundreds of dollars would be rendered useless by the move, along with cheaper add-ons such as chargers. Even cars with the current connector built in would need to be upgraded.

Why yes, as it happens, I do tend to be rather more amused than outraged. It’s not like any of Apple’s victimscustomers can actually be surprised or complain about this. It’s hardly a secret that the entire point of Apple’s “walled garden” strategy is to get you dependent on their technology and locked in so they can take you for as much as possible.

I’m only surprised they haven’t figured out a way to force you to store your information on their servers rather than locally, then pay to get access to it.

Abandon the Word

This is not a statement about Christianity, but rather, concerns that infernal organization known as Microsoft and one of its flagship products that has badly lost its way:

Nearly two decades and several text-handling paradigms ago, I was an editorial assistant at a weekly newspaper, where a few freelancers still submitted their work on typewritten pages. Stories would come in over the fax machine. If the printout was clear enough, and if our giant flatbed scanner was in the mood, someone would scan the pages in, a text-recognition program would decipher the letters, and we would comb the resulting electronic file for nonsense and typos. If the scanner wasn’t in the mood, we would prop up the hard copy beside a computer and retype the whole thing. Technology was changing fast, and some people were a few steps slow. You couldn’t blame them, really, but for those of us who were fully in the computer age, those dead-tree sheets meant tedious extra work.

Nowadays, I get the same feeling of dread when I open an email to see a Microsoft Word document attached. Time and effort are about to be wasted cleaning up someone’s archaic habits. A Word file is the story-fax of the early 21st century: cumbersome, inefficient, and a relic of obsolete assumptions about technology. It’s time to give up on Word.

I switched over to OpenOffice years ago, then after Sun was acquired by Oracle, to LibreOffice. I had to use a recent version of Word a few months ago, and although I’d been using Word since it was first released, I found the latest version very difficult to use. It’s the perfect example of a software company taking a perfectly useful, if flawed, piece of software and methodically making it less and less usable with every release.

If I was in charge of the Word project, I would throw out everything and start over from scratch. The fact that a single eight-character document is automatically transformed into a 16,224-character monster is lunacy squared.