Emptiness

vs.

Emptiness

because…

When building out products and features we do primarily two things: We listen to our community and we use data to make decisions. Today, we are announcing that there will be two changes to Flickr.

First, we are going to re-introduce the HTML embed option to the new photo experience. It will be live on Tue 3/18. This now gives you two great options to integrate Flickr content into your web experiences: with the Flickr Web Embeds and the popular HTML embed code that you asked for.

Secondly, we are announcing that we are deprecating the support for our built-in sharing options for WordPress, Blogger and LiveJournal on 3/25. Deprecating features is never an easy decision, but we have seen that all of these services combined are now adding up to less than one percent of daily share volume from Flickr.

(click here to continue reading Flickr: The Help Forum: [Official Thread] Welcome back HTML Embeds! Goodbye to some sharing options..)

I am saddened by this deprecation. The great website IFTTT does interact with Flickr to post to WordPress, I wonder will this upcoming change break my recipe for posting? Even my current Post To WordPress From Flickr recipe only works for photos uploaded recently, if I wish to post older images like the above parking lot scene, I have to use Flickr tools.

Flickr HTML embed

Flickr iFrame embed

Flickr HTML embed

Flickr HTML embed

Flickr Sharing Options

Flickr sharing options as of March 16th, 2014

Who Made That Nigerian Scam?

Max Ernst - Spanish Physician
Max Ernst – Spanish Physician

Speaking of spam, you probably have encountered the so-called Nigerian scam a few times. Maybe even your lawyer has…

The Nigerian scam may seem like a scourge of the Internet age, but it actually predates email. Before we started getting all-caps proposals in our inboxes, con men in West Africa plied their trade by fax and paper letter. Some of the first scams to make their way to Western Europe arrived by telex in 1989 and 1990, when businessmen in Britain started hearing that a wayward tanker of Nigerian crude could have its cargo claimed for bargain prices — in exchange, of course, for some cash upfront. Before then, Nigerian fraudsters aimed their grifts at locals. One scheme was the “wash-wash,” a literal money-laundering in which the mark is shown a valise of supposed bills blackened with Vaseline and iodine and promised a cut if he pays for an expensive cleaning agent.

(click here to continue reading Who Made That Nigerian Scam? – NYTimes.com.)

The scam is even older than that:

“Some of these guys came out and started perpetrating fraud,” says Andrew Apter, an Africa historian at U.C.L.A. “They used the language and insignias and letterhead of financial offices to lure people in.”

Apter has traced this sort of misuse of official iconography as far back as a century. When Nigeria was established as a colony under British rule in 1914, its first governor cracked down on scammers in fake uniforms who claimed to be collecting taxes on behalf of the empire. The advance-fee scam itself — whereby payments are extracted from a sucker who hopes to gain an enormous treasure — seems to have originated elsewhere. According to Robert Whitaker, a historian at the University of Texas, an earlier version of the con, known as the Spanish Swindle or the Spanish Prisoner trick, plagued Britain throughout the 19th century.

(click here to continue reading Who Made That Nigerian Scam? – NYTimes.com.)

Legal Tender
Legal Tender

From Wikipedia:

The Spanish Prisoner is a confidence trick originating in the late 16th century.

In its original form, the confidence trickster tells his victim (the mark) that he is (or is in correspondence with) a wealthy person of high estate who has been imprisoned in Spain under a false identity. Some versions had the imprisoned person being an unknown or remote relative of the mark.

Supposedly the prisoner cannot reveal his identity without serious repercussions, and is relying on a friend (the confidence trickster) to raise money to secure his release. The confidence trickster offers to let the mark put up some of the funds, with a promise that he will be financially rewarded when the prisoner returns, and perhaps also by gaining the hand of a beautiful woman represented to be the prisoner’s daughter. After the mark has turned over the funds, he is informed that further difficulties have arisen and more money is needed. With such explanations, the trickster continues to press for more money until the victim is cleaned out or declines to put up more funds.

(click here to continue reading Spanish Prisoner – Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia.)

Every deed and action that humans have done to each other has already been done in prior centuries…

Jason Kottke: The blog is dead, long live the blog

No Ego
No Ego

The blog-father, Jason Kottke opines that the blog has died…

Sometime in the past few years, the blog died. In 2014, people will finally notice. Sure, blogs still exist, many of them are excellent, and they will go on existing and being excellent for many years to come. But the function of the blog, the nebulous informational task we all agreed the blog was fulfilling for the past decade, is increasingly being handled by a growing number of disparate media forms that are blog-like but also decidedly not blogs. Instead of blogging, people are posting to Tumblr, tweeting, pinning things to their board, posting to Reddit, Snapchatting, updating Facebook statuses, Instagramming, and publishing on Medium.

In 1997, wired teens created online diaries, and in 2004 the blog was king. Today, teens are about as likely to start a blog (over Instagramming or Snapchatting) as they are to buy a music CD. Blogs are for 40-somethings with kids. Instead of launching blogs, companies are building mobile apps, Newsstand magazines on iOS, and things like The Verge. The Verge or Gawker or Talking Points Memo or BuzzFeed or The Huffington Post are no more blogs than The New York Times or Fox News, and they are increasingly not referring to themselves as such.

The primary mode for the distribution of links has moved from the loosely connected network of blogs to tightly integrated services like Facebook and Twitter.

(click here to continue reading The blog is dead, long live the blog » Nieman Journalism Lab.)

Yikes! G4 - still chugging
Yikes! G4 – still chugging

As an aside, though I’ve never met Mr. Kottke, he had a lot to do with how this humble blog exists. I always had a website, since first getting a floppy-disc copy of Mosaic1 way back in the Stone Age, but never knew what to do with my site until I discovered Kottke.org. Ahh, blogging, I could do that. I never learned how to code HTML beyond the basics, but blogging only required basic HTML and CSS skills. Sadly, I’ve become an increasingly lazy blogger, posting less and less frequently, but I haven’t thrown in the towel yet. 

He does have a point though, Twitter and Facebook and so forth consume an ever larger percentage of our collective online energies. Unfortunately, in my opinion, but then I’m over 402. Facebook especially is troubling to me as too often I hear of some arbitrary deletion of posting privileges, with minimal recourse. If you own your own data, you have much more control. Also if we only use Twitter and Facebook to communicate, we lose a large portion of our individuality – there becomes a vanilla plainness to the online world. On one side of the equation, no blink tags – yayyy; on the other, boring, shallow sites like BuzzFeed and HuffPost become the norm – meh.

I took the opportunity to clean up my blogroll, removing a few blogs that have died, and keeping a few dead blogs with the hope they resurrect. If you are reading this, and you have a compelling reason for me to add you to my blogroll, leave me a comment, and I’ll consider it.

Footnotes:
  1. in beta? or was that Netscape Navigator? Memory gets fuzzy []
  2. albeit childless []

Photo Republished at AT&T offers gigabit Internet discount in exchange for your Web history | Ars Technica

Eyeing John Marshall Law School

My photo was used to illustrate this post

AT&T is watching you browse. AT&T’s “GigaPower” all-fiber network has launched in parts of Austin, Texas, with a price of $70 per month for download speeds of 300Mbps (which will be upgraded to a gigabit at no extra cost in 2014). The $70 price is only available if you agree to see targeted ads from AT&T and its partners, however. Interestingly, AT&T labels the Internet service with targeted ads as its “premier” service while calling the service without targeted ads “standard.”

click here to keep reading :
AT&T offers gigabit Internet discount in exchange for your Web history | Ars Technica

automatically created via Delicious and IFTTT

Spam – Email Exceeded Storage Limit

You Could Have Done Better Than That
You Could Have Done Better Than That

I wonder how often normally careful people fall for requests like this one I received early this morning:

ATTENTION;

Your mailbox has exceeded the storage limit of 10GB, which is as defined by  the administrator, you are currently running on 10.9GB, you may not be able to send or receive new messages until you re-validate your mailbox . To re-validate your mailbox, send the following information below:

name:

User:

password:

Confirm Password:

E-mail:

phone:

If you fail to re-validate your mailbox, the mailbox will be disabled!

thank you System Administrator

Computer Repair LED
Computer Repair LED

especially when all the header information is usually hidden by most email clients. Suspicious stuff like email routed from Brazil or Thailand which would be a red flag is normally not displayed.

Received: from localhost (localhost [127.0.0.1]) by email.hujm.ufmt.br (Postfix) with ESMTP id B1DF2389C0B; Sun, 24 Nov 2013 11:03:45 -0300 (AMST) Received: from email.hujm.ufmt.br ([127.0.0.1]) by localhost (email.hujm.ufmt.br [127.0.0.1]) (amavisd-new, port 10024) with ESMTP id hTusU-YxVjDd; Sun, 24 Nov 2013 11:03:45 -0300 (AMST) Received: from [116.203.113.84] (unknown [116.203.113.84]) by email.hujm.ufmt.br (Postfix) with ESMTPSA id B61E7389BF7; Sun, 24 Nov 2013 11:03:28 -0300 (AMST) Content-Type: text/plain; charset=”iso-8859-1″ MIME-Version: 1.0 Content-Transfer-Encoding: quoted-printable Content-Description: Mail message body Subject: ATTENTION To: Recipients helpdesk@admin.in.th From: “System Administrator” helpdesk@admin.in.th Date: Sun, 24 Nov 2013 09:03:19 -0500 Reply-To: webmaster-upgradeunit@admin.in.th X-Mailer: TurboMailer 2 Return-receipt-to: webmaster-upgradeunit@admin.in.th Message-Id: 20131124140329.B61E7389BF7@email.hujm.ufmt.br

I am the System Administrator for several domains, so I knew this mailbox limit was not accurate, but prior ISPs I’ve used did have a storage limit, and I did open this email almost by habit based on the subject line alone. If I was a less-savvy recipient, would I think it strange that my SysAdmin was asking for my user name and password? Maybe not.

Photo Republished at Looking at a spam stream: The story of Jimmy Walker | Spamtacular

PayDay Loans 

My photo was used to illustrate this post

I was recently asked about how to go about proving that someone was not obtaining email addresses in a direct, opt-in manner. The methodology won’t surprise you, and if you have been involved in helping problematic clients for a while, the results might not even surprise you. The “someone” at issue was a payday loaner. That is, they were an information leads broker. They took information provided by website visitors and brokered that out to other folks who would use it to email them offers for payday loans. This is referred to as a “ping tree.” In this case, the target of our investigation was also managing the ping trees for their clients.…Front Window of a financial institution in Illinois which offers payday loans. License: (Photo source: swanksalot)

click here to keep reading :
Looking at a spam stream: The story of Jimmy Walker | Spamtacular

automatically created via Delicious and IFTTT

Experian Sold Consumer Data to ID Theft Service

We Finally Came To Realize

We Finally Came To Realize

A troubling tale via Krebs on Security

An identity theft service that sold Social Security and drivers license numbers — as well as bank account and credit card data on millions of Americans — purchased much of its data from Experian, one of the three major credit bureaus, according to a lengthy investigation by KrebsOnSecurity.

Contacted about the reader’s claim, U.S. Info Search CEO Marc Martin said the data sold by the ID theft service was not obtained directly through his company, but rather via Court Ventures, a third-party company with which US Info Search had previously struck an information sharing agreement. Martin said that several years ago US Info Search and CourtVentures each agreed to grant the other company complete access to its stores of information on US consumers.

Founded in 2001, Court Ventures described itself as a firm that “aggregates, repackages and distributes public record data, obtained from over 1,400 state and county sources.” Cached, historic copies of courtventures.com are available through archive.org.

THE ROLE OF EXPERIAN

In March 2012, Court Ventures was purchased by Costa Mesa, Calif.-based Experian, one of the three major consumer credit bureaus. According to Martin, the proprietors of Superget.info had gained access to Experian’s databases by posing as a U.S.-based private investigator. In reality, Martin said, the individuals apparently responsible for running Superget.info were based in Vietnam.

Martin said he first learned of the ID theft service after hearing from a U.S. Secret Service agent who called and said the law enforcement agency was investigating Experian and had obtained a grand jury subpoena against the company.

While the private investigator ruse may have gotten the fraudsters past Experian and/or CourtVentures’ screening process, according to Martin there were other signs that should have alerted Experian to potential fraud associated with the account. For example, Martin said the Secret Service told him that the alleged proprietor of Superget.info had paid Experian for his monthly data access charges using wire transfers sent from Singapore.

“The issue in my mind was the fact that this went on for almost a year after Experian did their due diligence and purchased” Court Ventures, Martin said. “Why didn’t they question cash wires coming in every month? Experian portrays themselves as the databreach experts, and they sell identity theft protection services. How this could go on without them detecting it I don’t know. Our agreement with them was that our information was to be used for fraud prevention and ID verification, and was only to be sold to licensed and credentialed U.S. businesses, not to someone overseas.”

Experian declined multiple requests for an interview.

(click here to continue reading Experian Sold Consumer Data to ID Theft Service — Krebs on Security.)

Or Pay The Price
Or Pay The Price

so if your account was one of the unlucky ones, what was stolen?

These services specialized in selling “fullz” or “fulls,” a slang term that cybercrooks use to describe a package of personally identifiable information that typically includes the following information: an individual’s name, address, Social Security number, date of birth, place of work, duration of work, state driver’s license number, mother’s maiden name, bank account number(s), bank routing number(s), email account(s) and other account passwords. Fulls are most commonly used to take over the identity of a person in order to engage in other fraud, such as taking out loans in the victim’s name or filing fraudulent tax refund requests with the IRS.

All told, findget.me and superget.info acquired or sold fullz information on more than a half million people, the government alleges.

Why exactly do we as a society allow Experian and similar organizations collect this data in the first place? They accumulate the data, and sell it to advertisers, or to scammers, and what benefit does it bestow on us? Other than headache and grief…

There was much gnashing of teeth when we discovered just how many hard disks the N.S.A. has filled with our personal data, why does Experian and other similar corporations get a pass from the public?

Revolution of The Innocent
Revolution of The Innocent

especially when Experian will skip away from this investigation with nothing more than a slap on the wrist with a wet noodle…

Meanwhile, it’s not clear what — if any — trouble Experian may face as a result of its involvement in the identity theft scheme. This incident bears some resemblance to a series of breaches at ChoicePoint, a data aggregator that acted as a private intelligence service to government and industry. Beginning in 2004, ChoicePoint suffered several breaches in which personal data on American citizens was accessed by crooks who’d used previously stolen identities to create apparently legitimate businesses seeking ChoicePoint accounts. ChoicePoint was later sued by the U.S. Federal Trade Commission, an action that produced a $10 million settlement — the largest in the agency’s history for a violation of federal privacy law.

Experian makes about $500,000,000 in profit a year, btw.

Big Data Owns You And You Cannot Opt Out

Electric Eye
Electric Eye

So Big Data is not only collecting, and selling your information online, but in retail stores too. I know we are being trained to just shrug our shoulders and chalk it up to living in the 21st C.E., but I can’t quite get comfortable with the idea that corporations have accumulated so much information about me and you that the information is a commodity. We’ve discussed how prevalent this activity is, a few times, or more.

The technology that allows stores to track shoppers’ cellphones, for instance, works even when customers do not log on to the Wi-Fi networks of stores. The only way a cellphone user can avoid being tracked is to turn off the Wi-Fi feature on their phones, which few are likely to do if they are unaware of the monitoring in the first place. While a few retailers like Nordstrom have posted signs telling customers that they were being monitored in this way, many others do not do so. (Nordstrom stopped tracking cellphones in May, partly as a result of complaints from customers.)

If stores want to track their customers, they should tell the public what they are doing and give people the ability to opt out of monitoring. Many shoppers say they are willing to give information about themselves in exchange for special deals and promotions. But some consumers go to physical stores because they want to protect their privacy. Traditional retailers would be smart not to alienate customers by surreptitiously tracking them.

(click here to continue reading You (and Your Cellphone) on Candid Camera – NYTimes.com.)

Eyeing John Marshall Law School
Eyeing John Marshall Law School

especially since technology to track us is advancing quickly:

Pam Dixon, executive director of the World Privacy Forum, says that although most of the focus in the media has been on how companies are tracking us through Internet browsers and smart phones, there is actually more danger of invasions of privacy occurring in physical retail outlets, mostly because consumers are unaware of the extent to which they are being tracked. “This is an entire business model that has sprung up that I think maybe three people in the entire country know about outside the industry,” she says.

And though analytics firms and retailers claim they aren’t using technology to personally identify shoppers or pair that information with financial histories, it is very much possible to do so. In 2010, the Association of Marketing in Retail produced a voluntary code of conduct for marketers and retailers to use as a guide in their tracking and marketing efforts. The code outlines the various tracking capabilities available and rates them on a scale from low risk to high risk. According to the code of conduct, a low-risk tracking method would include “infrared or laser or laser beam motion detectors” that can give retailers an idea of how many people are in a store and where they are traveling but “are not able to track or record individual consumer paths.” The high-risk end of the spectrum includes methods that allow retailers to individually track consumers by recognizing a smart phone wi-fi signal or through interpreting visual data from facial-recognition technology.

That kind of tracking is, according to Dixon, unethical and contrary to shoppers’ expectation of privacy. “Legally, stores have the right to put up security cameras, but the consumer expectation of privacy is being circumvented here,” she says. “Because when a consumer looks into that camera, they expect it’s being used for security, not marketing purposes.”

According to Mark Eichorn of the Division of Privacy and Identity Protection at the Federal Trade Commission, the FTC has been monitoring this type of consumer tracking but hasn’t found that firms are using facial-recognition software to create individual profiles of customers. Last December, the FTC held a workshop on facial-recognition technology in the retail space

(click here to continue reading Are Retailers Using Facial-Recognition Software to Track Customers? | TIME.com.)

Continuous Video Recording in Progress
Continuous Video Recording in Progress

To me, a government agency such as the FTC saying “we haven’t seen this activity” does not make me confident. The federal government is not proactive in most instances, preferring to Not Know, so that nobody can complain that Nothing Is Being Done. In other words, I’m guessing some corporations are using facial recognition software and merging that with databases of financial history and who knows what else. The NSA is one thing, but do you really want Home Depot or Macy’s to be able to profit off of you in this way? Where do you opt out? Nowhere, other than moving to Frostpocket and going off the grid…

Merchandise Mart Attracts Tech Start-Ups in Chicago

Don't Pretend Nothing Happened On that Day
Don’t Pretend Nothing Happened On that Day

I’ve mentioned this, at least in passing, and maybe only on Twitter, but the Merchandise Mart is now home to several tech businesses, as is the entire area. Enough of a trend that the stately New York Times noticed:

Once a dormant area of empty warehouses, the River North section of Chicago has evolved into a nexus of dining, night life and, most recently, an aspiring rival to Silicon Valley. Its 45 square blocks are home to the headquarters of Groupon, the Chicago offices of Google and several hundred technology start-ups.

Now River North’s digital transformation is extending to one of the neighborhood’s most storied — and decidedly low-tech — commercial addresses. The Merchandise Mart, a Depression-era behemoth of limestone, concrete and steel that has long been synonymous with fabric bolts and furniture, is becoming a destination for the city’s digital set.

“River North as an area has become very tech-savvy and very tech-cool,” said Todd O’Hara, founder and chief executive of Toodalu, an app-building start-up that moved into the building this year. “The Merchandise Mart is definitely kind of the pinnacle of all of it because of everyone coming in.”

The biggest newcomer, Motorola Mobility, plans to relocate its headquarters from the suburb of Libertyville to four floors of the mart next year, as well as take up a big chunk of the building’s roof space for entertaining and group events.

It is the third major technology company to sign a lease with the mart since December, and 175 or so small tech businesses like Toodalu sublet space.

(click here to continue reading Merchandise Mart in Chicago Attracts Tech Start-Ups – NYTimes.com.)

I’d include the nearby West Loop area too, there are plenty of examples there too – Threadless and so on. I think it’s cool, since for the most part, tech businesses are happy with industrial-esque spaces with exposed brick and mechanicals. In other words, they are not moving in and destroying every building in their wake to build cookie-cutter WalMarts and Targets, or bland corporate HQ. Schafer Condon Carter even restored a beautiful old wreck of a building on W. Madison.1 

Streaking Home
Streaking Home

And the Merchandise Mart, while a beautiful building on the outside, does need a little bit of modernization, at least from what I’ve seen of the interior.

The new tenants also cite the proximity of commuter rail lines, the abundance of parking, bike locker storage — and the energy around the River North neighborhood. According to BuiltInChicago.org, a Web site dedicated to the tech sector, the area had nearly 7,500 tech jobs as of last month.

“This is, like, the hottest place in the city right now,” said Kevin Willer, the chief executive of the Chicagoland Entrepreneurial Center, which manages 1871, a nonprofit digital hub that provides space to start-ups in the mart.

That hub has helped convert the 12th floor into a lively area of curving sofas and people on Razor scooters, but even the mart’s new fans say the aging giant remains a place largely associated with “a lot of dark, dreary rooms,” as Mr. O’Hara, the Toodalu founder, said.

Opened in 1930 by Marshall Field & Company, now defunct, the mart had been owned by the Kennedy family under Joseph P. Kennedy Enterprises for more than a half century before being sold to Vornado in 1998. With 4.2 million gross square feet, it is among the largest commercial buildings in the world.

The recent influx of tech tenants has brought stark change. The designers of the tech offices have been allowed to gut and renovate spaces. (In the process, some historical gems, like a metal and brick fire door found at 1871, were left to meld with the newly designed areas.) The mart is installing a distributed-antenna system, to be finished by year-end, which will improve cellphone reception and wireless connectivity throughout the building.

Some of the tech companies are configuring their new spaces with a hopeful eye to the future.

Razorfish, the digital marketing and advertising company owned by Publicis, consolidated its disparate Chicago offices into the mart’s 12th floor nearly a year ago, installing conference tables of reclaimed wood and a keg refrigerator with two rotating beers on draft.

Razorfish hired about 100 more people since opening its Chicago office, which was built for a capacity of 400, according to Lori Schram, the company’s facilities manager, and plans to expand its space within the mart.

And 1871, whose name alludes to the year of the great Chicago fire and the innovation that happened during the rebuilding of the city, has so far accepted 175 companies out of 600 applications for space, Mr. Willer said. Tenants of 1871 pay monthly rent for either shared or reserved space and qualify for seminars, tech events and access to venture capital firms and angel investors in the hub.

and that’s a good excuse as any to show a few more of my favorite photos taken in the general area…

 Merchandise Mart Reflects

Merchandise Mart Reflects

Easist Thing I Ever Did
Easiest Thing I Ever Did

Dusk in River North
Dusk in River North

Caresses of Light
Caresses of Light

Sometimes The Sky Is Too Bright
Sometimes The Sky Is Too Bright

Meditation Upon a River
Meditation Upon a River

Destinations
Destinations

Fall Nocturne
Fall Nocturne

More of my photos of the Merchandise Mart, of River North, of Wolf Point

Footnotes:
  1. though SCC is not a tech company, but an ad agency. Close enough. []

Delicious Twitter Feedburner IFTTT problems again

Defunct Tweets
Defunct Tweets

For a long time, I had worked out a good system, using Delicious, Twitter, Feedburner and IFTTT. I found interesting articles or phrases in my daily internet life, tweeted them, and these URLs would be automatically fed into my Delicious account, and this in turn would seed entries into my daily blog email post1. Thus my blog’s hunger stayed fed, and I didn’t have to go to the trouble of creating an entire post around a few sentences. However, Twitter, in its drive to become less useful, has disallowed this kind of interaction by changing its APIs. Twitter wants to force every user interaction to occur on its own webpage, presumedly so they can sell advertising “eyeballs” – viewers – but this means a lot of the cool stuff that Twitter could be used for no longer are viable. At least that is my understanding of what happened between yesterday and today.

I’ll see what I can do to replace this lack of grist for my web grinding mill, but it is irritating. Anyone have any suggestions? Email me, or leave a comment.

Here is what should have been included in this morning’s blog email2:

  • “Mother Cabrini Shrine Reopening; Le Corbusier in Color; More!” http://t.co/w9ainEtn
  • “Ross Douthat’s schtick at The Atlantic: repeating Redstate talking points, minus the obscenity and grammatical errors” http://t.co/rkJVN0eH
  • “Todd Akin compared the recent debate performance of Democratic Sen. Claire McCaskill to that of a “wildcat,” http://t.co/JOmjmi29
  • “In 1960, about 5% of Americans expressed a negative reaction to political intermarriage; in 2010, about 40% did ” http://t.co/ONkWfpDk
  • “Pro-life asshole vows to fight “to his dying breath” for rights of unborn” http://t.co/bMJ6qFwc C’mon Canada, you are better than this
  • Opium Museum http://t.co/vTfSaJm4 
  • “How Collecting Opium Antiques Turned Me Into an Opium Addict” http://t.co/KWV4aoey
  • “Romney mentioned that it would routinely take up to eight years to turn around a firm” http://t.co/xdbBghjv but US govt easier?
  • Why Ryan is worse for Romney than “47 percent” http://t.co/79gHpcPE
  • Brad DeLong: I Do Not Understand Why This Is Not Tax Fraud… http://t.co/wLipfAfZ Good ole DoubleClick
  • Your Body’s Best Time for Everything http://t.co/N7KUjLQj

And actually, I’m being a little lazy in my cut/paste job here, as these links would also have included the full, original title of the URL, which is sometimes descriptive as well. For instance, the second link about Ross Douthat would have also spelled out “And If Only The Vietnamese Had Worn Bright Red Coats And Formed Infantry Squares”. You get the idea.

Anyway, thanks for messing up my workflow Twitter…

Footnotes:
  1. and in the sidebar over there to the right if you visit the actual blog page []
  2. along with whatever photos I uploaded to Flickr, and if I had written an actual blog post like the one you are reading []

Joe Nocera Trolls Apple

Tech Graveyard
Tech Graveyard

NYT columnist and Steve Jobs antagonist Joe Nocera builds a flimsy case for Apple’s decline upon a tenuous foundation in today’s paper. A few points worth responding to:

If Steve Jobs were still alive, would the new map application on the iPhone 5 be such an unmitigated disaster? Interesting question, isn’t it?

(click here to continue reading Has Apple Peaked? – NYTimes.com.)

No, not really. Are you asserting that everything Apple ever released while Steve Jobs was alive was perfect? As a Mac user from before Steve Jobs came back to Apple, I’ve followed the company pretty closely, and there were plenty of crappy applications, plenty of dud hardwares, plenty of missteps during the fifteen years of Jobs running Apple. Ping? The PowerMac G4 Cube? The so-called antenna problem with the iPhone 4? Final Cut Pro X? The hockey puck mouse? Some iterations of Mobile Me? You get the idea: Steve Jobs and Apple have failed plenty of times, releasing unpolished, unfinished or unsuccessful products. But for Joe Nocera, the alleged failure of Apple Maps 1.0 means Apple is about to crumble into pieces. Next week, Nocera is going to call for Apple to spin off their iOS division, and license the software to Nokia. 

In rolling out a new operating system for the iPhone 5, Apple replaced Google’s map application — the mapping gold standard — with its own, vastly inferior, application, which has infuriated its customers. With maps now such a critical feature of smartphones, it seems to be an inexplicable mistake.

And you can see it in the decision to replace Google’s map application. Once an ally, Google is now a rival, and the thought of allowing Google to promote its maps on Apple’s platform had become anathema. More to the point, Apple wants to force its customers to use its own products, even when they are not as good as those from rivals. Once companies start acting that way, they become vulnerable to newer, nimbler competitors that are trying to create something new, instead of milking the old. Just ask BlackBerry, which once reigned supreme in the smartphone market but is now roadkill for Apple and Samsung.

That’s one way of looking at it. But all we really know is that the license agreement between Apple and Google has ended. Perhaps Google didn’t want to license their maps to Apple anymore? Or Google raised the licensing fee to astronomical levels? After all, Google’s Android is a direct competitor to Apple’s iOS. Apple has always been more comfortable making their own versions of software so that companies don’t have leverage over Apple’s business decisions. Remember in the late ‘90s when Microsoft and Adobe almost stopped developing Microsoft Office and Photoshop for the Mac? I’d be leery of depending upon Google as well, Google has become much more cutthroat in recent years. 

Dreaming of Phone Booths for a modern Superman
Dreaming of Phone Booths for a modern Superman

And maybe that’s all it is — a mistake, soon to be fixed. But it is just as likely to turn out to be the canary in the coal mine. Though Apple will remain a highly profitable company for years to come, I would be surprised if it ever gives us another product as transformative as the iPhone or the iPad.

Part of the reason is obvious: Jobs isn’t there anymore. It is rare that a company is so completely an extension of one man’s brain as Apple was an extension of Jobs. While he was alive, that was a strength; now it’s a weakness. Apple’s current executive team is no doubt trying to maintain the same demanding, innovative culture, but it’s just not the same without the man himself looking over everybody’s shoulder. If the map glitch tells us anything, it is that.

But there is also a less obvious — yet possibly more important — reason that Apple’s best days may soon be behind it. When Jobs returned to the company in 1997, after 12 years in exile, Apple was in deep trouble. It could afford to take big risks and, indeed, to search for a new business model, because it had nothing to lose.

Fifteen years later, Apple has a hugely profitable business model to defend — and a lot to lose. Companies change when that happens. “The business model becomes a gilded cage, and management won’t do anything to challenge it, while doing everything they can to protect it,” says Larry Keeley, an innovation strategist at Doblin, a consulting firm.

Again, Nocera is trolling here. He claims to be able to see into the future, and tells us plebes that Apple will never make an innovative product again, ever! Really! And the reason that Apple is going to sour is that a first iteration of an app they released on Wednesday doesn’t please everyone. Maybe Mr. Nocera ought to switch to decaf and lay off the bath salts?

For the record, Maps seems to be ok for me, but I rarely used the Street View in Google Maps, plus Chicago is pretty well mapped. If I lived somewhere else, maybe I’d be displeased as well. But version 1 of Google Maps wasn’t so great either, and that didn’t mean that Google was about to descend into RIM/BlackBerry territory. No, instead, there were steady improvements made, and now Google Maps is fairly useful, and accurate. I still use it on my phone, by the way. In fact, I have an icon on my home screen that allows me to load it whenever I need it, or am concerned that Apple’s Map app might be wrong.

I would bet Joe Nocera $500 that Apple is going to improve its iOS Map app rapidly, and by version 3, this won’t be an issue for the majority of users. For all the negative press, I haven’t read of many people returning their iPhone because the Map app is so horrible.


A less “trolly” response from Mike Dobson:

I have spent several hours poring over the news for examples of the types of failures and find nothing unexpected in the results. Apple does not have a core competency in mapping and has not yet assembled the sizable, capable team that they will eventually need if they are determined to produce their own mapping/navigation/local search application.

Perhaps the most egregious error is that Apple’s team relied on quality control by algorithm and not a process partially vetted by informed human analysis. You cannot read about the errors in Apple Maps without realizing that these maps were being visually examined and used for the first time by Apple’s customers and not by Apple’s QC teams. If Apple thought that the results were going to be any different than they are, I would be surprised. Of course, hubris is a powerful emotion.

If you go back over this blog and follow my recounting of the history of Google’s attempts at developing a quality mapping service, you will notice that they initially tried to automate the entire process and failed miserably, as has Apple. Google learned that you cannot take the human out of the equation. While the mathematics of mapping appear relatively straight forward, I can assure you that if you take the informed human observer who possesses local and cartographic knowledge out of the equation that you will produce exactly what Apple has produced – A failed system.

The issue plaguing Apple Maps is not mathematics or algorithms, it is data quality and there can be little doubt about the types of errors that are plaguing the system. What is happening to Apple is that their users are measuring data quality. Users look for familiar places they know on maps and use these as methods of orienting themselves, as well as for testing the goodness of maps. They compare maps with reality to determine their location. They query local businesses to provide local services. When these actions fail, the map has failed and this is the source of Apple’s most significant problems. Apple’s maps are incomplete, illogical, positionally erroneous, out of date, and suffer from thematic inaccuracies.

(click here to continue reading Exploring Local » Blog Archive » Google Maps announces a 400 year advantage over Apple Maps.)

My point remains: the Apple Map app may be bad, will probably get somewhat better in the future, and this still doesn’t mean that Apple is about to turn into Sears & Roebuck, and be discarded in the tech graveyard.

On Orbitz, Mac Users Steered to Pricier Hotels

Had Enough for a Long Time
Had Enough for a Long Time

As a Mac user, I don’t like the implications of this business model…

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.

Orbitz has found that Apple users spend as much as 30% more a night on hotels, so the online travel site is starting to show them different, and sometimes costlier, 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.

Orbitz found Mac users on average spend $20 to $30 more a night on hotels than their PC counterparts.

Orbitz executives confirmed that the company is experimenting with showing different hotel offers to Mac and PC visitors, but said the company isn’t showing the same room to different users at different prices. They also pointed out that users can opt to rank results by price.

(click here to continue reading On Orbitz, Mac Users Steered to Pricier Hotels – WSJ.com.)

When I’ve used Orbitz in the past, I didn’t even consider they were upselling me to more expensive options, and hiding the cheaper options from me. In the future, I will not even bother using Orbitz.

Android Is a Money Pit for Google

Calumet 5-6969
Calumet 5-6969

The real question is how long will Google be content on losing money, lots of money, on Android? Especially since most of Google’s mobile ad revenue comes from Apple. Seems to me Google is hedging their Android bet by purchasing Motorola.

Brian Hall digs in a bit:

I mean, Android isn’t making a dime for Google. It’s a massive cost center. With the acquisition of Motorola, which isn’t making money from Android, Google will have dropped upwards of $20 billion on Android.Think of that: $20 billion.Twenty billion of shareholder money.…

Then I thought, considering my relentless criticism at Google for not breaking out any costs or revenues associated with Android, that someone at Google was feeding this reporter a story — and he bit, hook line and sinker. Not sure. Fellow seems to genuinely think that all the money Google continues to pour into Android, with no return, is an acceptable — strategic — business practice. Perhaps it’s because I don’t live in Silicon Valley. I mean, near as I can tell, beyond the insiders who are getting rich flipping talent, the only companies actually earning sustained revenues are Apple and Google. I guess earning revenues is no longer the hot trend in Silicon Valley.

(click here to continue reading Android so good it doesnt even have to make Google any money! Ever! | brian s hall.)

Google Tracked iPhones, Bypassing Apple Browser Privacy Settings

Ride Smarter
Ride Smarter

Don’t Be Evil is a thing of the past, the new Google is brash in its insistence that consumers are the product. You are their product, to be sold to advertisers. What you want is not important, only your demographic information is, since that is the commodity that makes Google wealthy.

Google Inc. and other advertising companies have been bypassing the privacy settings of millions of people using Apple Inc.’s Web browser on their iPhones and computers—tracking the Web-browsing habits of people who intended for that kind of monitoring to be blocked.

The companies used special computer code that tricks Apple’s Safari Web-browsing software into letting them monitor many users. Safari, the most widely used browser on mobile devices, is designed to block such tracking by default.

Google disabled its code after being contacted by The Wall Street Journal.

WSJ’s Jennifer Valentino-DeVries has details of Google and other advertising companies that were bypassing privacy levels set by users of Apple’s Safari browser on their iPhones. Photos: Getty Images

The Google code was spotted by Stanford researcher Jonathan Mayer and independently confirmed by a technical adviser to the Journal, Ashkan Soltani.

In Google’s case, the findings appeared to contradict some of Google’s own instructions to Safari users on how to avoid tracking. Until recently, one Google site told Safari users they could rely on Safari’s privacy settings to prevent tracking by Google. Google removed that language from the site Tuesday night.

…Google’s privacy practices are under intense scrutiny. Last year, as part of a far-reaching legal settlement with the U.S. Federal Trade Commission the company pledged not to “misrepresent” its privacy practices to consumers. The fine for violating the agreement is $16,000 per violation, per day. The FTC declined to comment on the findings.

(click here to continue reading Google Tracked iPhones, Bypassing Apple Browser Privacy Settings – WSJ.com.)

Utterly embarrassing for Google, and right when the Congress is poised to look at Google’s privacy practices.

For the record, I use Google constantly, have had a Gmail account since it was first offered, use Google Analytics on this site, even have Google ads (if you haven’t blocked them like I have)

The EFF Foundation blogs:

Earlier today, the Wall Street Journal published evidence that Google has been circumventing the privacy settings of Safari and iPhone users, tracking them on non-Google sites despite Apple’s default settings, which were intended to prevent such tracking.

This tracking, discovered by Stanford researcher Jonathan Mayer, was a technical side-effect—probably an unintended side-effect—of a system that Google built to pass social personalization information (like, “your friend Suzy +1’ed this ad about candy”) from the google.com domain to the doubleclick.net domain. Further technical explanation can be found below.

Coming on the heels of Google’s controversial decision to tear down the privacy-protective walls between some of its other services, this is bad news for the company. It’s time for Google to acknowledge that it can do a better job of respecting the privacy of Web users. One way that Google can prove itself as a good actor in the online privacy debate is by providing meaningful ways for users to limit what data Google collects about them. Specifically, it’s time that Google’s third-party web servers start respecting Do Not Track requests, and time for Google to offer a built-in Do Not Track option.

Meanwhile, users who want to be safe against web tracking can’t rely on Safari’s well-intentioned but circumventable protections. Until Do Not Track is more widely respected, users who wish to defend themselves against online tracking should use AdBlock Plus for Firefox or Chrome, or Tracking Protection Lists for Internet Explorer.1 AdBlock needs to be used with EasyPrivacy and EasyList in order to offer maximal protection.

(click here to continue reading Google Circumvents Safari Privacy Protections – This is Why We Need Do Not Track | Electronic Frontier Foundation.)

Embedding Tweets

 

Defunct Tweets
Defunct Tweets

Umm, yay?

Let’s try the short code version: