Category: Writing

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Writing

On Cell Phone Bill Comparisons

Canadians often state that they are hurt by high cell phone bills and point to other jurisdictions to insist that other markets enjoy far lower prices. With cost concerns in mind, I suspect we’ll soon see reporting that, on T-Mobile’s UK network, customers can get unlimited Internet access, texts, and calls between T-Mobile users and 2000 minutes to talk with other, non-T-Mobile, customers for just under $57/month.

It should be noted, of course, that ‘unlimited Internet access’ under most T-Mobile plans is quite limited: 500MB of streaming content and upload/downloads of files are included, though browsing, social media (barring uploads and downloads of files), and email is (more or less) ‘unlimited.’

While costs are arguably higher in Canada, doing a close comparative analysis to divine cost structures across jurisdictions is fraught with difficulties, especially when quality of the network and their relative speeds are taken into consideration as well. Still, I’d love to see a default in Canada where long distance across Canada vanishes and basics like voice mail and call display are free to each and every plan. That I pay for such basic services is absolutely shameful and not something you routinely see in the US and UK.

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Writing

A Comment on GPS and Smartphones

There are a great number of concerns around GPS chips being integrated into smartphones; surveillance, third-party tracking, and profiling (to say nothing of bad results!) are all issues that technologists ‘in the know’ warn of. I don’t want to talk about any of these issues.

No, I want to say this: of the smartphones that I’ve used in the past 6 months (iPhone 3GS, Samsung Focus, BlackBerry Bold 9900, BlackBerry Torch 9800) the BlackBerry devices have the most reliable, accurate, and speedy GPS functionality. The Focus was unreliable, at best, and while the 3GS’s UI was the best it was slower and less accurate than what I enjoy with the aforementioned BlackBerry devices.

For many people the GPS is a nicety, icing on the cake. For me, I rely on my GPS and maps integration to get from points A to B. The integration between Google Maps and the iPhone was excellent, if not the fastest. Integration on the Windows Phone was poor, largely because they missed my market: I’m a conscientious traveller and so prefer public transit. Windows Phones are absolutely unable to parse transit information in any of the major or minor cities I’ve visited over the past several months. If they can’t even do a non-US world city then the integration is not ready for prime time.

While the Google Maps/GPS integration on BlackBerry has an archaic UI – it really, really, looks like it was developed several years ago (because it was) – it’s fast and reliable. UI beauty is of critical importance for getting novices to use new technologies, but UI alone is insufficient to sell consumers on the value of a device over the long term. On this basis the Windows Phone OS failed outright and iOS trailed the ‘older’, ‘archaic’ and ‘aging’ BlackBerry OS 7.1 device I’m using right now.

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Links Writing

Viruses stole City College of S.F. data for years

The viral infestation detailed by the Chronicle is horrific in (at least) two ways: first, that data was leeched from university networks for year after year, and second that it’s only now – and perhaps by happenstance – that the IT staff detected the security breach. From the article:

a closer look revealed a far more nefarious situation, which had been lurking within the college’s electronic systems since 1999. For now, it’s still going on. So far, no cases of identify theft have been linked to the breach. That may change as the investigation continues, and college officials said they might need to bring in the FBI.

…

Each night at about 10 p.m., at least seven viruses begin trolling the college networks and transmitting data to sites in Russia, China and at least eight other countries, including Iran and the United States, Hotchkiss and his team discovered. Servers and desktops have been infected across the college district’s administrative, instructional and wireless networks. It’s likely that personal computers belonging to anyone who used a flash drive during the past decade to carry information home were also affected.

Some of the stolen data is probably innocuous, such as lesson plans. But an analysis shows that students and faculty have used college computers to do their banking, and the viruses have grabbed the information, Hotchkiss said.

It is for precisely this kind of reason that regular updates of common, lab-based, computer equipment must be performed. These computers must centrally factor into campus security plans because of their accessibility to the public and a broad student population. I simply cannot believe that systems were so rarely refreshed, so rarely updated, and so poorly secured that a mass infection of a campus could occur, unless a university security and data protection policy were not being implemented by staff. Regardless, what has happened at this campus is an inexcusable failure: lessons should be learned, yes, but heads should damn well roll as well.

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Writing

parislemon: This Is Why We Can’t Have Nice Things

I agree with parislemon’s general take on the targeting of Apple and labour: Apple isn’t alone, and we can’t ignore the role of local government in (not) regulating the state of affairs at Foxconn (or other large manufacturing) plants. This said, language like the following in unacceptable and intentionally uncritical:

 While this report brings such an issue to the forefront, similar pieces and stories surface quite frequently, actually. Guess what changes? Nothing. It’s shitty to say, but it’s the truth. And we all know it.

The fact of the matter is that we live in a world that demands amazing technology delivered to us at low costs and at great speed. That world leads to Foxconn.

We say we care about the means by which the results are reached when we read stories such as this one. But then we forget. Or we chose not to remember. We buy things and we’re happy that they’re affordable. And then we buy more things. And more. With huge smiles on our faces. Without a care in the world.

In the above quotation, Siegler obfuscates the real role that our governments could have in shaping the supply chain. Imagine: if there were a requirement  that certain imported products (e.g. electronics) had to be certified to meet standardized ethical and human rights requirements. Would that increase the price of goods/prevent some from coming to market, initially? Certainly. As a result Chinese (and other foreign national) companies would dramatically increase labor standards because it would no longer be a competitive advantage to have such incredibly low standards. Prices would stabilize and we could buy iPhones, Blackberry devices, and the rest without sleepless nights.

What must happen, however, is that the West must see beyond itself. Citizens must recognize that they can shape the world, and refuse to just give up on the basis that change would threaten the existing, ethically bankrupt, neo-liberal economic practices that surround our lives. If the EU and North America refused to import ethically suspect electronics and gave significant preferential advantage to companies that were ethical in the production and disposal of goods, then significant change could occur.

It is our choice to adopt, or refuse, to enforce basic human rights in the economic supply chain. Technology – it’s production, usage, and disposal – is rife with ethical quandaries. We have to serious address them if we are to remedy intolerable behaviours the companies like Foxconn perpetuate.

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Writing

Browsing on Your Mobile Should Not Disclose Your Phone Number

In the past day or three, it’s come to light that O2 – a major mobile phone provider in the UK – made the very serious error of disclosing its users’ phone numbers in HTTP headers (i.e. the headers that are part of every single communication with a website). The researcher who discovered this – Lewis Peckover – has made available a site that will check whether your phone is disclosing its phone number when visiting websites. You don’t need to be an O2 customer to double check that your mobile provider is doing things (im)properly.

This significant release of information occurred because:

“Technical changes we [O2] implemented as part of routine maintenance had the unintended effect of making it possible in certain circumstances for website owners to see the mobile numbers of those browsing their site,” the company wrote.

However, the company added that it had previously disclosed this information, but only when “absolutely required by trusted partners”.

“When you browse from an O2 mobile, we add the user’s mobile number to this technical information, but only with certain trusted partners.”

The company said this was needed to manage “age verification, premium content billing, such as for downloads, and O2’s own services”.

However the technical glitch meant the sharing went further it said: “In addition to the usual trusted partners, there has been the potential for disclosure of customers’ mobile phone numbers to further website owners.”

In light of this ‘glitch’ I would hope that a more secure way of confirming age/purchasing credentials is rapidly rolled out. Significantly, not only every website visited had access to mobile phone numbers but every advertising server potentially had access to this information as well. This would include Google, Quantcast, and so forth.

It will be incredibly curious to see how the ICO treats this data leak. I think that core failures like the O2 phone leak demonstrate just how linked many of our communications systems and identifiers are, and speak volumes to the need for significantly better evaluation of network upgrades before they are rolled out to live environments.

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Links Writing

Piracy as Saving History?

I haven’t seen this argument before. It’s clever: stripping DRM (and/or transforming files to be cross-compatible with a variety of software readers) means that (in theory) those files will be accessible for longer periods of time, thus letting us preserve our (digital) history. From the article:

Piracy’s preserving effect, while little known, is actually nothing new. Through the centuries, the tablets, scrolls, and books that people copied most often and distributed most widely survived to the present. Libraries everywhere would be devoid of Homer, Beowulf, and even The Bible without unauthorized duplication.

The main difference between then and now is that software decays in a matter of years rather than a matter of centuries, turning preservation through duplication into an illegal act. And that’s a serious problem: thousands of pieces of culturally important digital works are vanishing into thin air as we speak.

At issue: I’m really not sure that a total archive of everything digital is actually something that we want, or necessarily need. A LOT of books, games, poems, and so forth were lost to the mists of time, and it’s not entirely clear to me that our world has fallen apart because of such losses.

History is a patchwork that is contingent on us perceiving certain items as more or less important from a partial and retrospective position. Moreover, it should be noted that truly significant texts/poems/artifacts have historically been replicated and distributed because of their value/importance at the time. Do we necessarily need a campaign of mass piracy – under the auspice of ‘preserving history’ – to ensure that similar efforts are made to secure the most critical elements of our past? I’m not so sure.

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Links Writing

Speedboast Now Costing Customers Money?

Rogers’ SpeedBoost system temporarily increases the rate that data is transmitted to their customers in the earliest moments of downloading an item. This system is meant to get ‘bursty’ traffic to end-users faster that would otherwise occur, as well as initially buffer streaming video so that customers don’t suffer delays. It was initially couched as a free ‘extra’ but it seems like Rogers customers now get to pay for these ‘enhancements’:

… a Rogers representative insists that users are lucky that the hikes weren’t worse, given Rogers had to “absorb much of these costs.” The company insists the improvements include some additional TV channels and SpeedBoost, a technology that delivers a little extra bandwidth at the beginning of a download (Comcast users in the States know it as PowerBoost):

$2/customer is a hefty increase when all customers are aggregated. While DSL Reports suggests that this move is driven by a lack of competition in Rogers’ primary markets I think that this is only one element of the story. A key problem facing Canadian ISPs is the high market saturation in wireline Internet services; quite simply, it can be challenging to attract new customers away from their current providers to raise quarterly revenues. One solution is to increase prices in minuscule ways, such that you deliver increased “value” to shareholders while targeting monthly cost increases just below consumers’ pain (and flight) points.

This doesn’t make Rogers’ practices any less horrible for their customers, but I really think that focusing exclusively on competition – and avoiding a reflection on market saturation – is missing a key part of the broader story.

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Links Writing

Flexibility and Low Working Standards

The New York Times has a piece that argues – though the narrative is highly forgiving – that the flexibility ‘demanded’ by contemporary technology firms (amongst others) can only occur if they’re allowed to outsource labor. The reason? In countries like China you can rouse 8,000 people out of their dorms in their walled factory-city and put them to work almost instantly. In China, the government will subsidize the costs of massive factory development. Because in China, you can find thousands of engineers – not ones with bachelor degrees, but with a middle-ground space between high school and university – within two weeks.

In part, Asia was attractive because the semiskilled workers there were cheaper. But that wasn’t driving Apple. For technology companies, the cost of labor is minimal compared with the expense of buying parts and managing supply chains that bring together components and services from hundreds of companies.

For Mr. Cook, the focus on Asia “came down to two things,” said one former high-ranking Apple executive. Factories in Asia “can scale up and down faster” and “Asian supply chains have surpassed what’s in the U.S.” The result is that “we can’t compete at this point,” the executive said.

Never forget that language like ‘scale up and down’ really means ‘add and shed labor’, which is further translated to ‘pay people so they can live and work and then rapidly fire them without cause.’ Moreover, the reason why supply chains are so effective in Asia are because most of the bits and pieces of today’s gadgets are manufactured in dense techno-factory domains. These locations are incredibly hazardous to individuals who work there and the environment they are located within.

The ‘common sense’ of locating these factories in China shouldn’t obscure the fact that the West is benefiting off the hard labor of foreign citizens that costs those citizens now – with their health and lives – and may poison them in the future – both as their factories destroy the local environment and return toxic e-waste in the form of disposed products.

There is an ethics to technology. We need to start actively thinking about them.

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Links Writing

Google to Internet: “Papers Please”

I don’t dislike Google. Many of the company’s products are incredibly delightful to use. I support a fair amount of the company’s public advocacy work, though not all of it (caveat: the same could be said of almost all organizations I’m sympathetic towards). That said, I think think that their policy regard real names and pseudonyms if fucking absurd. As noted by Ars:

On Monday, Google Product Vice President Bradley Horowitz wrote on Google+ that the company will roll out its name policy changes this week. One change is that anyone will be able to add nicknames in addition to their real names. The more significant change, however, is that Google will also let people use pseudonymsinstead of a real name, but there are caveats. Horowitz indicates that the pseudonym must be established and well-known in order to qualify for a Google+ profile.

“Starting today we’re updating our policies and processes to broaden support for established pseudonyms, from +trench coat to +Madonna,” Horowitz wrote. Google may flag the name that a person intends to use and ask for additional information to confirm the person’s identity, including “Scanned official documentation, such as a driver’s license” or “Proof of an established identity online with a meaningful following.” This would seem to raise privacy problems for those who need pseudonyms for safety reasons, but a post in Mashable says “Google will destroy all documentation you send them once the account verification process is complete.”

Seriously: your pseudonym has to be “established and well known”?! By who’s standards? If I have an offline pseudonym does that count? What if my pseudonym is ‘common’ and used by a lot of people – does that impact how well ‘established’ it is?

Google is actively trying to force people into their social network and they’re just being horrific to their end-users in the process. Demanding that people provide official documents to join a social network?! Ridiculous.

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Links Writing

RIM: Never Trust A Company Who’s Name Is A Sex Act

technicallycorrect:

Earlier today Joint-CEO’s Jim Balsillie and Mike Lazaridis stepped down from their positions after 20 years in charge of Research In Motion (RIM), the producers of BlackBerry phones.

I’m a harsh critic of RIM, their phones are appalling in almost every regard comparative to their…

I disagree with the author’s 1, 2, 3, and 4 (of 5)  points on the following basis:

  1. The Playbook is actually pretty good;
  2. While streamlining some of the phone models might be a good idea, becoming a prestige brand like Apple will threaten RIM’s expansion in less wealthy foreign markets;
  3. Moving to an entirely new OS (again) isn’t as simple as it sounds when you’re a security-minded company. WebOS would likely need to be re-written from the ground up. Hopefully BB 10 is enough to compete with the current line of OSes (really, the competition at this point is Windows Phone OS; beating iPhone would be targeting an aged OS that is itself in desperate need of UI updates);
  4. I like screen-based phones, but can appreciate physical keyboards. This can be a space where RIM differentiates itself from Apple. Moreover, I see an awful lot of people typing on keyboards on buses, in classes, in coffee shops, and so forth: there’s an attachment to tactility that many are unwilling to give up.

I agree that more developers need to be brought on board (point 5). Not sure what can be done, specifically, other than create a welcome development environment, really work on outreach, and provide a good set of default API hooks that are robust and varied enough to create compelling applications. Ideally, RIM would do what they could to integrate core functionality into their devices in such a manner that they could extend that functionality with a minimum of effort. Apps are important, but a flexible and organic OS (that doesn’t get bloated) is as, if not more, important than apps themselves.