The Distraction of Phones

By | November 22, 2011
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Phones

Why are we so intrigued by our phones, but not our computers?

I now realise why we buy new cellphones. If we didn’t, there would be nothing to do during those times we find ourselves without external distractions, such as taking public transport, sitting in cafes waiting for friends to turn up (or even, if they have, but turn out to be less interesting than we remember), or during any social function which might involve actually communicating with someone we don’t know (or even ones we do).

That’s when we explore features on our phone. We’re quite happy to spend hours, days, years even exploring every nook and cranny of our gadget to see what it can do. It’s not that we’re particularly interested in it, or what features it might have, but when compared to something as hard as actually interacting with other people, reading the dense and portentous content of newspapers, or even lifting one’s neck to look out of the bus window, we’d rather adopt the more ergonomically satisfying posture of head down, cradling a pleasing form factor and delving into sub-menus with the vague idea of changing a ring-tone, or wallpaper, or something. Anything but actually cope with anything external.

That’s why phone manufacturers add features, and that’s why they bring out new phones all the time. So my question is this: Why, when we’re at our computer, do we not have that same inquisitiveness? Why do all my friends know every single little feature on their cellphone but have no idea what features like “print to PDF” are? And, perhaps more pertinently, why are they so incurious about their computers that the prefer to pick up the phone, or Skype, or cross heavily mined international borders by foot to bug me with problems that could be solved with one, possibly two,  mouseclicks?

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That Sucking Sound? Your Credit Card Data

By | November 22, 2011
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Good piece by my WSJ colleage Joe Pereira on the TJX debacle, the biggest known theft of credit-card numbers. It all came down to lax Wi-Fi security on the part of the retail chain’s stores. A good read:

clipped from online.wsj.com

The $17.4-billion retailer’s wireless network had less security than many people have on their home networks, and for 18 months the company — which also owns T.J. Maxx, Home Goods and A.J. Wright — had no idea what was going on. The hackers, who have not been found, downloaded at least 45.7 million credit- and debit-card numbers from about a year’s worth of records, the company says. A person familiar with the firm’s internal investigation says they may have grabbed as many as 200 million card numbers all told from four years’ records.

Twitters: Poetry or Drivel? Part II

By | November 22, 2011
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Nick Carr’s interesting take on Twitters: does their brevity make them meaningful or just another channel of crap? Three quick points:

+ Twitters, like blogs, run the gamut from poetry to drivel
+ One person’s drivel is another person’s poetry: It usually depends on whether you know them or not
+ This has more to do with America’s late awakening to the cultural shifts of SMS which the rest of us got used to more than five years ago.

clipped from www.roughtype.com

James Governor has posted two love notes to Twitter over the last couple of days. In the latest, he argues that Twitter’s 140-character limit promotes brevity. He says that the suggestion that you can’t be “either deep or meaningful” in 140 characters or fewer is nonsense – it’s “evidence of the verbosity of our culture.”

The Source of the Malware Scourge

By | November 22, 2011
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Despite appearances, the U.S. is still the most popular place for the bad guys to place their malware code.

StopBadware.org has listed those Internet Service Providers that wittingly or unwittingly host “badware” — an umbrella term for any kind of software that insidiously installs itself on your computer. What’s interesting is that while there is one China company on the list, by far the biggest culprit is one iPowerWeb Inc, based in Phoenix, Arizona, which has more than 10,000 infected sites on their servers. (By comparison, then next biggest culprit has a quarter that.)

Badware is usually installed on a site without the owner’s knowledge, either by exploiting holes in the software that delivers content to the site or hacking into the site by guessing the owner’s password or making use of a hole in the server software. Victims would unwittingly download the badware by either visiting the website in question or be directed there from other websites which had been infected. Here’s a case of a fake MySpace page which lures victims to an iPowerWeb-hosted site where users give up their MySpace password. Interesting detail on how these work is here.

iPowerWeb appear to have a long history of attracting accusations that it doesn’t take this kind of thing seriously. Examples are here, here and here (from two years ago). So far there’s no press statement from iPowerWeb on its website; I’ve requested comment.

The sad thing here is that when Google and organisations like StopBadware find these hacked sites the sites are flagged and removed from Google searches, or else prefaced by a warning page. While this makes sense, it causes mayhem for the owners of these sites who are either not technically savvy enough to resolve the problem, or find themselves in limbo while their site is removed from the list after they’ve cleaned it up. A recent discussion of the problem on the stopbadware Google Group is here. (StopBadware says it will respond to appeals within 10 days and says the time is closer to two.)

One can only imagine the scale of the mess caused by all this. Hosting companies need to be smarter about monitoring this problem they’ll face declining custom or lawsuits.

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Queuing: Cultural or Economic?

By | November 22, 2011
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Fascinating discussion on Freakonomics blog about lining up and how it varies from culture to culture. I must confess, after 20 years in Asia I’m still British and somewhat obsessed by queuing, and get very upset when it’s not followed. One commenter explains it thus:

There is a simple explanation for this. It is cultural. Europe doesn’t respect queuing because it is not central to their culture. Queuing is a British invented social rule. The British have a whole range of social rules that can range from common sense to obtuse.