Category: Internet matters

Posts about the internet

Generation of writers

The internet is often accused of dumbing people down, particularly young people. At least one result from the Stanford Study of Writing seems contrary to that, and is discussed in Wired:

Before the Internet came along, most Americans never wrote anything, ever, that wasn’t a school assignment. Unless they got a job that required producing text (like in law, advertising, or media), they’d leave school and virtually never construct a paragraph again.

It’s hard not to find that rather encouraging, even if electronic forms of communication are sometimes gaining ground at the expense of real-time socializing. I think there is special value in written forms of communication, not least because they put more of an onus on the person expressing themselves to do so in a clear and comprehensible way.

I found this via Metafilter.

CAPTCHAs

Salad at Zen Garden, Ottawa

Like many web users, I am of two minds about Completely Automated Public Turing test to tell Computers and Humans Apart (CAPTCHAs). On the one hand, I see their importance in fighting several types of spam. In particular, they are an important defence against the spam blogs that have become so prevalent recently. These sites are set up based on a high-value keyword. They then trawl through real blogs, copy content, and put it up. To Google, this looks like a real blog specializing in that keyword. People find it through Google searches, and sometimes end up clicking the ads that are invariably strewn across these robot-created sites.

When it comes to creating new blogs and email accounts, I find CAPTCHAs entirely reasonable.

Where I object is with more mundane uses, such as vetting comments on blogs. Using a CAPTCHA can seriously annoy readers: especially those who have poor vision, or who are using browser add-ons like NoScript for extra security. To me, when a blog owner chooses CAPTCHAs as a security feature, they are saying that they are happy to waste the time of all of their commenters, rather than invest a bit of their own setting up a spam filtering system and occasionally checking for false positives and false negatives. If your blog gets 5,000 comments a day, you have a good excuse. If it gets less than 20, it really seems like a combination of Akismet and some .htaccess rules should be just fine.

reCAPTCHA (which Google recently purchased) has at least two redeeming features. For one, it does useful work. Unlike most CAPTCHAs, which simply garble text for users to decipher, reCAPTCHA uses text from real documents being scanned. It gives users two words to decipher: one known word to perform the CAPTCHA function, and one unknown word for use in digitizing the book. This leads directly to the second good feature: since these books have already been scanned by the best optical character recognition (OCR) software available, they are fundamentally protected against automated CAPTCHA attacks. Of course, you can always pay real people a small fee for solving the puzzles. reCAPTCHA is thus a relatively robust system, against automated attack, with the additional benefit of adding to the sum of useful digitized information.

Hopefully, future CAPTCHA systems will be less annoying for users and more difficult for computers to game. Experimental forms have included tasks like picking out only kittens from photos showing a number of types of animals. This is apparently a task that is easy for humans, but quite beyond the capability of automatic image recognition software.

Personally, I prefer to think of them as Computer Automated Person Checking Algorithms. It lacks the Turing shout-out, but is more concise and comprehensible.

Cloud computing and consumers

Writing in The Guardian, Cory Doctorow provides a good explanation of why cloud computing might not be so great for individual users. Basically, companies are hoping to use it to wring more money from people, for services that were previously free. As he explains:

[T]he main attraction of the cloud to investors and entrepreneurs is the idea of making money from you, on a recurring, perpetual basis, for something you currently get for a flat rate or for free without having to give up the money or privacy that cloud companies hope to leverage into fortunes.

That’s not to say there aren’t potential advantages. It may well be worth a montly fee for well implemented and highly secure backup, especially for those who aren’t too computer savvy or don’t have access to Apple’s excellent Time Machine product. (Doctorow talks about using Amazon’s S3 service and the Jungle Disk tool.)

Really, backup seems like the cloud computing application with the most value for users, since encrypted backups elsewhere will probably be safe if you are robbed or have your house burn down. Another application with more limited utility might be buying access to huge amounts of computing power, which could be useful for some researchers.

Incidentally, Time Machine isn’t quite good enough for protecting irreplaceable physical data, since your external hard drive could be destroyed in an accident at the same time as your computer, or stolen. While I use Time Machine for daily backups, I also back up critical files (such as my photos) to a hard drive I keep at work and update every few months. A fairly easy way to do this is to keep all your irreplaceable documents in one place – such as username/documents/original/ – and then copying it over to the third drive every few months. rsync is an ideal way to do this, but it isn’t very user friendly.

“Write for yourself, edit for your readers”

Ductwork on brick

This great bit of advice comes from Copyblogger. When it comes to the proper use of language in online communication, I think the key issue is one of respect. Being respectful of your readers means taking care to express yourself well, as well as avoid spelling and grammatical mistakes. Taking a slapdash approach to editing suggests that you value a few seconds of your own time more than the time of everyone who will subsequently read whatever you are producing. From my perspective, that is rather rude.

Other good resources include George Orwell’s 1946 essay “Politics and the English Language.” This includes concise and excellent advice on how to improve prose (apologies for the inappropriately gendered language):

A scrupulous writer, in every sentence that he writes, will ask himself at least four questions, thus:

  1. What am I trying to say?
  2. What words will express it?
  3. What image or idiom will make it clearer?
  4. Is this image fresh enough to have an effect?

And he will probably ask himself two more:

  1. Could I put it more shortly?
  2. Have I said anything that is avoidably ugly?

These basic ideas can also be reformulated as six ‘rules:’

  1. Never use a metaphor, simile or other figure of speech which you are used to seeing in print.
  2. Never use a long word where a short one will do.
  3. If it is possible to cut a word out, always cut it out.
  4. Never use the passive where you can use the active.
  5. Never use a foreign phrase, a scientific word or a jargon word if you can think of an everyday English equivalent.
  6. Break any of these rules sooner than say anything outright barbarous.

These apply just as much to corporate, government, and academic documents as they do to blog posts or personal letters.

WPA cracked in 60 seconds

WPA is a more secure encryption system for wireless networks than the older WEP system, which was notoriously vulnerable. Now, Japanese researchers have devised an attack that cracks WPA networks using the Temporal Key Integrity Protocol (TKIP) algorithm quickly and easily. So far, WPA2 and WPA using AES are not vulnerable to the attack. On past form, it seems likely that those will eventually become vulnerable to rapid compromise, as well.

The broader point this demonstrates is how attacks always get better and never get worse. As such, the longer any particular system has been deployed, the less likely it is to be secure. Threat analysis needs to be ongoing, and accompanied by the patching and replacement of vulnerable systems. Both because of improving computer power and new mathematical developments, this is especially true when it comes to cryptography. As MC Frontalot explains (in a song that references rainbow tables), “you can’t hide secrets from the future with math.”

Built-in antivirus for OS X

Rumours are circulating that Apple’s Snow Leopard OS will include antivirus capabilities. This is a welcome development. While OS X rightly has a good reputation for security, there is no commercial operating system that is immune from malware. In addition to malware that targets OS X itself, there are also exploits based around flash, Adobe PDFs, and even specific pieces of hardware.

Adding antivirus protection might be a bit of a public relations blow to Apple, which has cultivated a false sense that there is no malware that affects Macs. Nevertheless, it is a good security move. Indeed, the server version of OS X has included such capabilities for some time.

Win a print for commenting

As regular readers will already know, next month I have a photography exhibition at Raw Sugar Cafe (692 Somerset, Ottawa). Some kind of an event corresponding to the opening of the show will be arranged, with details to be published here when known.

As a means of encouraging discussion, the following will be in effect for the time between now and the start of the show: anyone who posts a comment on any of my posts will be entered into a draw for a mounted photographic print of mine which I will select. Each comment will have an equal chance of winning, so people who post more will have better odds.

I will have the print delivered for free (though not necessarily immediately) to anyone in Ottawa, Toronto, or Montreal. Those farther afield would be required to reimburse me for the shipping.

Incidentally, if anyone wants a print of any of my photos, they are welcome to contact me. I am sure we could work something out.

Continue reading “Win a print for commenting”

High-speed stock trading

I had no idea stock markets operated so quickly now:

High-frequency traders may execute 1,000 trades per second; exchanges can process trades in less than 500 microseconds (or millionths of a second).

In addition to showing off just how blazingly fast financial transactions have become, this also demonstrates just how much more precise and reliable some networking hardware is, when compared to consumer stuff.

For the sake of comparison, I sent four packets from my home computer to the server that runs this site. It took them an average of 92 milliseconds to make the journey: 184 times longer than the rate at which exchanges can apparently process trades. Indeed, the difference between the quickest and the slowest packet to return was itself six times longer than the total processing time.

Clearly, those on dial-up connections need not apply.

Preliminary review: smartphones and the Nokia E71

Kitchen hooks

Since the E71 is my first smartphone, I am inevitably responding to both the general medium and the specific device. So far, my experience has been mixed. The phone doesn’t do anything as well as a real computer does – obviously – nor as well as I was hoping when I purchased it. While usable, the keyboard is awkward. The OS is a bit finicky and annoying. The web browser lacks capability and fluidity of use, and even voice calls seem to be of a worse quality than on my cheap old Nokia 6275i.

All that being said, the E71 has the considerable advantage that it puts the internet into a form that fits in a pocket and can be accessed from anywhere. The email and messaging features are those I use and appreciate most, with web browsing and maps following next. The media features are very basic, and I never use them. Coupled with a bluetooth keyboard, the phone is extremely capable for email, texting, and instant messaging. Even without, you can maintain one conversation at a reasonable pace, without needing to strain yourself excessively. Another feature that is surprisingly good is the speakerphone, which can be used quite effectively while cooking or sitting at a desk. The battery life is also good: enough to cover about eight hours of very active internet use. The built-in email app is ok, but limited. Annoyingly, the installable GMail application is only a bit more capable. It cannot, for instance, apply labels to messages. As such, they clutter up my inbox instead of being slotted away into appropriate places. Managing multiple streams of emails is far less intuitive with this interface than with GMail’s excellent online version (not fully usable with the E71 browser). Thankfully, Microsoft’s Mail for Exchange application allows perfect syncing of contacts and calendar items between GMail and the native Nokia apps. Never mind the oddity of using Microsoft software to help Nokia hardware and Google software work well together.

My specific complaints about the E71 include:

  • Annoyingly often, you need to tell the phone to connect to the internet, then using what protocol. For me, the answer is always ‘yes’ and the network is WiFi if available, GPRS otherwise. I dearly wish I could just lock those choices into the whole OS, rather than being forced to enter them literally every five minutes of use.
  • The keyboard is annoyingly small, though that comes part and parcel with a device smaller than an iPhone.
  • Copying and pasting requires an acrobatic manoeuvre: pressing three keys simultaneously, releasing, and then pressing three more.
  • The web browser doesn’t work with a lot of the menus at the back end of WordPress and can be very finicky about posting comments. It also has a viewpoint that lurches around violently as new portions of pages get loaded: super annoying if you are filling in a number of fields.
  • Even with a WordPress-specific app, the phone is not adequate for posting to the blog. For instance, it cannot interact with the WordPress media library, so as to include images in posts.
  • The device won’t download the full content of even small text-only emails. Each time you open one, it goes to a ‘retrieving’ screen that lasts 5-20 seconds.
  • Unlocking the keypad requires pressing two small keys in order. A dedicated lock switch would be better.
  • The camera is rotten, and the video recording is even worse.
  • Bluetooth connections go idle after an absurdly short period of time: maybe 60 seconds. There is no option to alter this.
  • There is no way to use the built-in read LED as a flashlight, as you can on the 6275i.
  • It lacks the super-useful automatic calling card dialler from the 6275i.
  • The voice quality isn’t great. If often sounds a bit like a VoIP phone without enough bandwidth.
  • Both applications and the whole OS crash pretty often, even when you are running programs one at a time. Sometimes, the only way to resolve it is to turn off the device and turn it back on.
  • For some reason, my unlocked E71 can only find a handful of applications in Nokia’s ‘Download!’ area.

Given how well reviewed the E71 is among smartphones, I can only guess that others have even bigger problems. I will admit to wondering whether the iPhone would have been a better choice. For web browsing and media, I would say ‘certainly yes’ since the demo iPhones I have tried are enormously better than the Nokia in both regards. In terms of messaging – which is my number one use – I still think that even a cramped physical keyboard is better than no keyboard at all.

At this stage, about two weeks in, I am less impressed than I expected to be with both smartphones and the E71. That said, it is a useful thing to have when computers are not readily available, and I may grow more accustomed to it as more time passes. One thing I mean to try but haven’t yet is tethering it with my G4 iBook.