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Quotations

2013.1.3

You see, the thing about humans is that we have a really short attention span, and really bad memories. It’s actually hard for me to remember a time before I had a phone that could effectively replace my entire computer in most situations. A phone that I could make video calls from from any spot in the world, one that would let me log into our team’s IRC channel while on the floor of a major media event in any city and communicate with our whole staff. A device that was small enough to fit into the front pocket of my arguably-too-tight jeans that would let me connect and share my most important thoughts about developing news and world events — in real time! — with millions of people at once. A device that would underpin and enable modern social movements and political revolutions, generally shrink our sense of the size of humanity, and mesmerize and delight almost everyone who used it.

Joshua Topolsky, “Reasons to be excited”

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Quotations

2012.12.31

I’m jealous of old people because they didn’t have the internet and Facebook when you were young — you could get away with just about anything.

Mathew Ingram, “Snapchat and our never-ending quest for impermanence”
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Quotations

2012.12.30

Google had the capacity to capture everything people did on the site on its logs, a digital trail of activities whose retention could provide a key to future innovations. Every aspect of user behaviour had a value. How many queries were there, how long were they, what were the top words used in queries, how did users punctuate, how often did they click on the first result, who had referred them to Google, where they were geographically … These logs told stories. Not only when or how people used Google but what kind of people the users were and how they thought.

Steven Levy, In the Plex: How Google Thinks, Works, and Shapes Our Lives
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Quotations

2012.12.29

…tablets have gotten so cheap that it’s hard to make a case that spending $500+ on a new Windows 8 machine is better than just keeping what you have and spending $200 on a cheap tablet. That goes double when the cheap tablet in question has hundreds of thousands more apps. Throw in an unfamiliar user interface, and you’re basically telling people to please leave the Microsoft Store.

Pete Pachal, “The Problem With Windows 8”
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Turning IT Into a Profit Centre

Jeffrey Carr has some amusing thoughts on transforming IT in corporate businesses from a cost to a profit centre. Just a taste of the humour:

The good news, or at least potential good news since no one is doing this yet, is that the undiscovered malware lurking on corporate networks potentially represent tens or hundreds of thousands of dollars in income for the corporation. And since it resides on the corporate network, it becomes the property of that corporation. All of a sudden, something that you’ve viewed only as a threat and an expense has become a valuable commodity thanks to the trend in selling offensive malware to government agencies.

One can easily imagine how his article, slightly reworked, would have made an excellent April fool’s column.

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How foreign firms tried to sell spy gear to Iran

Steve Stecklow is one of the few reporters that has continued to write about Iran’s acquisition of surveillance equipment for the past several years. At this point he has a good grasp of how the technology gets into the country, what’s done with it, and why and how vendors are evading sanctions. His article earlier this year provides a good look at how Huawei and ZTE alike have sold ‘lawful intercept’ equipment to the Iranian government. I’d highly recommend taking a look at what he’s written.

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Quotations

2012.12.11

Life under a national security state is not a life. Living under such a state is simply living like a slave, or at best it is like living in a big prison, albeit one that has invisible bars. While invisible, these bars are, nevertheless, extremely constraining.

Maher Arar, from “What Life Looks Like Under a National Security State”
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Quotations

2012.12.10

When it comes to a backhoe versus fiber, the backhoe always wins.

Jim Reese, from Steven Levy’s In The Plex
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Links

Incredibly Detailed Outing of Android UI Problems

Ron Amadeo has a terrific and comprehensive post on all the various Android UI issues. Well worth the read if UI and UX is something you pay attention to.

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The issue here is that data reduced to paper form loses much of its usefulness. The effect is to take power away from the recipient of the data (and by extension in this case from you as a citizen) and conserve it in a government institution as much as possible. Unless the user is bloody-minded enough to re-enter it manually, which of course is only possible at a certain scale.

On the topic of Canadian FOI responses; read the blog post here