Professor Geek

Most blog readers are familiar with RSS readers that are installed on your PC, however there are some limitations to this model:

1. Since the reader is installed on one PC, you can’t stay up to date very easily when you use mulitiple PCs.
2. If you install a reader on multiple PCs, you will have trouble keeping the PCs synchronized (what you have read vs. what has not yet been read). Although there are workarounds to this, depending upon the reader you are using, none of them are simple.

There are also advantages of having your reader on your PC:

1. Your reader can stay up to date automatically, so there is no delay when you decide to read your new posts.
2. The installed reader is much more customizable
3. The installed reader is much faster
4. Privacy/Security is better on an installed reader

If an installed reader doesn’t work best for you, you might consider an online aggregator. There are many available and I ran into a nice comparison on the TechCrunch blog. Check it out if you are interested in making your reader web-based instead of PC-based.

This week’s edition of Information Week contains a very interesting article entitled “What Google Search Reveals About Us.” The article outlines, in some detail, a few of the issues surrounding the Google search and the subpoena Google received (and fought) recently to turn over some of their search records.

The article is excellent and brings up several points regarding personal information:

1. “Google has called into question whether the government’s subpoena complies with the Electronic Communications Privacy Act, which limits the circumstances under which electronic data and communications can be disclosed to the government and other entities.”
2. “Google queries are ‘disclosed routinely to third parties when a user clicks any link in Google search results,’ writes Philip B. Stark, a professor of statistics at the University of California at Berkeley and a government expert witness, in court documents.”
3. “Web servers contain logs of text files that are records of site visitor activity. Anyone with access to those logs - and that’s not limited to system administrators - can determine, in most cases, the IP address of the visitor’s computer, the date and time the visitor requested each page and image on the site, the referring URL, and more.”
4. In January, one blogger demonstrated “how Web information can be manipulated to encroach on privacy: He wrote a computer script to download all Amazon Wish Lists posted by people name Edgar, winnowed the results to controversial titles, located the individuals who posted the lists using Yahoo People Search, then plotted their locations on Google Maps. ‘The technology exists to watch everybody,’ he warns.”
5. “Google confirms that it can identify people who have submitted specific keyword search terms using their IP addresses or HTTP cookies. It also can identify, in some circumstances, the search terms submitted by a specific user.”
6. “The evidence left behind during web searches can be telling, yet it also can be misconstrued or used with malice. Even those who think the U.S. government is looking after their best interests may find themselves in disputes with colleagues, employers, ex-spouses, insurers, or competitors. In such circumstances, bits of Web usage information can be connected to present an unwelcome, unflattering, or damning picture - and one that may or may not be accurate.”
7. A bill has been proposed in congress, entitled the Eliminate Warehousing of Consumer Internet Data Act of 2006. It is “aimed at protecting consumer privacy and preventing the indefinite storage of data.”

It appears that, at present, the burden is on the user to insure their own personal privacy and security. Remember that any Internet activity you engage in is logged somewhere, on some server, and there is no way for you to tell how that information might be used, who might have access to it, and how long it will be retained. There are currently no laws covering this area. All you have are “privacy policies” to rely on, many of which are not worth the bits they are stored in.

No, Microsoft and good ideas are not mutually exclusive. Microsoft has a really good idea concerning personal security, phishing schemes, and the like, that they are building into Vista, their next operating system. It is not an application, but a protocol. Protocols are sets of rules that, when agreed to by participants, govern how something operates. They are not software, but simply rules of the road. Think of it in the physical world as the protocols being the rules of the road and the software being the cars. They move along the road just fine if everyone obeys the rules.

Microsoft has come up with a proposed protocol that would give users complete control over their own personal (and sensitive) information, allowing them to dole out whatever pieces of that information they see fit only to those whom they choose to give it to. People who approach you (as in phishing scams) without knowing the information you gave them, would be immediately identified for what they are. For example, if you gave your credit card company certain pieces of your information store, your credit card company would be able to present those pieces, encrypted properly, to you, immediately validating who they are. A fake company trying to look like your credit card company would not have that information and would be immediately tagged as fake.

You can read the details about this in a recent Wired news article. My kudos to Microsoft for a good idea that might just get us out of the wild west mess the Internet is currently in.

David Shenk, in his book Data Smog: Surviving the Information Glut, speaks of the “2×4 effect,” the idea that we are so overloaded with information that in order to get someone’s attention, you (figuratively) have to hit them over the head with a 2×4. An interesting article on the CNet blog talks about an O’Reilly tech conference (the O’Reilly conferences are generally premium conferences in the tech world) pondering the idea of getting one’s message across when everyone is already overloaded with information. In fact, the attendees are generally so overloaded that sessions at this conference lasted no longer than 15 minutes, mostly to appease their “continuous partial attention.”

What is happening to our attention spans with our attempts at multitasking and our severely overloaded senses? One of the speakers, Linda Stone, a former Microsoft vice-president said:

“… technology can’t exist for technology’s sake. It needs to answer the question, ‘Does this product improve my quality of life?’ Wikis might be best for brainstorming, while cell phones are ideal for crisis management. Do you really need to access a Wiki on your cell phone? Only if you’re brainstorming about a crisis.”

How’s your attention span?

I received an email from one of my former MBA students today. Here is the essence of it:

I was a student in your graduate level MIS class last fall semester. We talked quite a bit about security. I had a very interesting thing occur at my home last night. I have a wireless router for hookup to the internet (that way I can be lazy and sit on the couch and access the web). When I
arrived home (at my apartment) last night, there was a guy sitting in a parked van along the street. I thought it was odd, but I just went ahead and went inside. About an hour later, I was getting ready to go to bed and could hear that van (still running) outside my window. I got up because I knew something was going on. I looked down and could see he had a laptop computer in there. I instantly went in and unplugged my wireless router. I looked back out the window, and after messing with his computer for about 10 seconds he instantly drove off. I know he
had to be accessing my internet.

My question: My computer was turned off, but could he still have been hacking into my computer? Also, what harm could he do under my name? I would appreciate any info you can give me on this. My wife wanted me to call the police but I don’t really think there is anything they can do about it??

I have heard of people doing this very thing, such as pulling into Super 8 Motel parking lots to have access to the internet.

My response to this former student was to at least use the WEP encryption that virtually all wireless routers have. Unfortunately, most of them are delivered with the default being that WEP encryption is turned off. If you want to make sure you are safe from such userpers as described here, be sure to keep in mind that this type of activity actually happens more often that you might think. Consider what these interlopers can do with your IP address (and you ARE responsible for what happens on your assigned IP address): child porn, spamming, illegal gambling, or any other kind of Internet fraud known to man. You are VERY vulnerable if you don’t secure your wireless network.

When I was running an ISP business I received a call one day from an FBI agent who was investigating some illegal activity that had happened at an IP address that I had assigned to a subcontractor. I was able to give them the location of the IP address for their investigation. Although I never was told what type of activity it had been, it had certainly been something serioius for them to be taking the time and effort to investigate it. Suppose that someone cruised to your house in the middle of the night, tapped into your network, and used it to conduct some illicit activities over the Internet. It would be virtually untraceable to that person, but the spotlight would be on you. Bottom line: Protect yourself … especially since the tools to do so are built into virtually every wireless you can buy today.

What would it be like to have microprocessors that don’t use transistors? It would mean instant boot, no startup time, all kinds of other benefits. The full article about this can be found at Wired News, but it’s a neat idea and apparently very possible. I used a figure in a presentation I gave yesterday at the ELearn 2006 Conference in Savannah, Georgia. It goes like this: In 2020, 70% of the jobs that will be available do not exist today because they will be based on technologies, 80% of which do not exist today.

This latest development is just another piece of evidence that those figures are likely pretty close to correct. Can you imagine what a complete rework of computer processing would mean? It would be equivalent to the transistor replacing the vacuum tube. From an engineering viewpoint, it would make nanotechnology much closer to reality and would truly make computing ubiquitous.

Have you always wanted to get those family photos in some kind of lasting format? Well, how about publishing them into a professionally formatted and bound book? Books are format-independent and last almost forever. Not only that, but they are easy to pass around and require no technology to look at.

This is a great idea: Download free software to help you create your book, then upload the book and have it published in as few as a single copy. I’m thinking that this could be a great gift for my family … my photos put into book form. The business model looks good, with the money being made off the printing, not off the software. What a great idea. The company, www.blurb.com, is not out of beta yet, but you can visit the web page and they’ll let you know when things are ready to go.

By the way, the books sell for as little as $40, including shipping, and for that you get a hardbound, full color book. This idea demonstrates that the Internet is fostering ideas that are only limited by the imagination.

I ran across this little article on Wired News today and it gives you a way (all free) to take a snippet of music from a CD that you own and download it to your phone as a ring tone. Of course, your phone has to be able to use MP3 files as ring tones in order to make it work. That said, this is a good introduction to MP3 editing using Audacity, a package I have been using for years. In fact, I use it to edit my podcasts and the audio track of my vodcasts. If you have a capable phone, this is worth trying if you really want to have flexibility for your ring tones. After all, why should you pay again for music you have already paid for?

Generally, my aggregator of choice has been SharpReader. Why? Because it works well, is fast, works in the background (like most aggregators should), is easy to organize, and can export files. So why did I try out some server-based alternatives? Well, here’s the problem: I work on several computers, as I have mentioned before, and an aggregator is much more difficult to keep synchronized than, say, your MS Word documents file. In the first place, it’s always working. In the second place, there just isn’t an easy way to update the data and synchronize it between computers.

It would seem, then, that an Internet-accessible server-based aggregator might be a possible solution for someone like me. After all, I could access the reader and my feeds from anywhere on the Internet, and it would alleviate the problem of synchronization. Alas, it really isn’t the case. First, I tried downloading and installing my own server-based solution, Gregarius. It worked fine, and I was able to import my feed list from SharpReader. But it was slow and had some issues. Being open source software, I don’t think it has matured yet to the point I would like, and some of the features I was used to in the desktop solution just weren’t there. Then I found GoogleReader. While it works better than Gregarius, and has the advantage of me not having to run it on my server, it also lacks some of the components I am used to in SharpReader.

Having tried the server-based solution, I went back to the desktop solution I was using and looked for an easy way to synchronize. In reading the documentation for SharpReader, I found out that if I copied an entire directory from one computer to another, the SharpReader installations on my various computers would stay up to date. So here was my strategy, which I have been successfully using for the past week or so: Since I have a thumb drive that I use for synchronization anyway, I just started copying that SharpReader directory, in its entirety (it isn’t that big) every time I sync my other files. I has worked like a charm and only takes a few seconds. When I am about to leave a computer and move to working on another one, I shut down SharpReader, copy the requisite directory to my thumb drive, and move on to the next computer. When I arrive at that one, I copy the folder from the thumb drive to the proper location on the hard drive and then load SharpReader, which I leave running until I leave that computer, at which time I repeat the process.

It’s not the most elegant solution, but it works for me.

Want a cool download? You can freely download MIT’s HyperScore music generation software. It’s pretty cool and if you are somewhat musically challenged, you can do it by ear! Once you create your masterpiece, you can send it to someone else, download it as a ring tone for your phone, or just save it.

One limitation is that your ability to download the ring tone will depend upon your carrier. When I messed with it today, there were only two carriers, Cingular and Verizon (not AT&T) that you could download to. Since I have Sprint as my carrier, I was unable to test that feature. I did create a short little ring tone of about 10 seconds and emailed it to myself, so that part of it works fine.

This is fun software if you want to be creative and not think it is your phone ringing when it is actually someone else’s with the same song (it happens to me at airports all the time).