Category: Things that matter

Bad design frustrates users

(via Tingilinde)

I’ve link to Joel on design before because he has good things to say about bad design. I’ve got some hands on experience with a TVisto playback device that seems to have a bad user interface that I’ll write about later (I want to work more with it before I declare definitively that the interface is bad). Yesterday, news.com ran an article about the problems many people have using modern gadgets with poor design problems.

Half of all malfunctioning products returned to stores by consumers are in full working order, but customers can’t figure out how to operate the devices, a researcher said on Monday.

. . .

The average consumer in the United States will struggle for 20 minutes to get a device working before giving up, the study found.

[tags]Product design, gadgets[/tags]

Experience with socialized medicine

One of the editors over at The Consumerist writes some about his experience with socialized medicine.  The article is in response to an article about California’s plan to institute socialized medicine.  In the end, he seems to prefer paying more for medicine in exchange for better care.  I have no experience with socialized medicine, but folks I know who have had socialized and privatized medicine have all preferred privatized.

I’m torn on this. Ireland has socialized medicine, and it sucks. When I first moved to Dublin, I took my Yamaha Superscooter out for a rush-hour drive and took a spill off it going around 55, breaking both my arms and one of my legs. Luckily, I was right around the corner from the hospital, so I got up from the mangled wreck of my bike, flagged down a taxi, and had him bring me here. When I got to the emergency ward, a scrolling sign chipperly announced that average waiting time was 8 hours. It was 9am on a Tuesday morning.

. . .

The bottom line is that money talks. Whether we’re talking about health care, cars or cellular phone coverage, you get better service the more money you pay. When no one’s paying any money, you as an individual become a statistic and receive the base minimum of care, competence and attention to maintain the aggregate. So making private health care out-and-out illegal seems like a disastrous move for the consumers of health care.

[tags]Socialized medicine[/tags]

Police intimidation in south Florida

(via boingboing)

This is an old story (early February), but interesting and a bit scary.  A police abuse watchdog group went to 38 police stations around south Florida to find out how to file a complaint against an officer.  Only 3 stations provided complaint forms.  Since complaint forms are not something police are required to provide, this isn’t a huge deal.  What is bad, and a bit scary, is the amount of intimidation the tester apparently encountered while trying to find out how to file a complaint.  In particular, one officer made a fairly open threat to shoot the tester.

Partial transcripts are provided on in the story, as well as a lengthy video showing the story that was on TV about the inquiries.  A few weeks after the original story ran, the officer shown on camera threatening the tester sued the television station, trying to block the station from airing the story and video.

[tags]Police intimidation[/tags]

Network discrimination simplified

Here’s a simplified write-up by Ed Felton on the topic of network discrimination.  I think this helps non-techies see why there would be a problem with the two-tiered internet so many big companies (baby bells, cable internet providers) want and why it would be bad for consumers.

Focus now on a single router. It has several incoming links on which packets arrive, and several outgoing links on which it can send packets. When a packet shows up on an incoming link, the router will figure out (by methods I won’t describe here) on which outgoing link the packet should be forwarded. If that outgoing link is free, the packet can be sent out on it immediately. But if the outgoing link is busy transmitting another packet, the newly arrived packet will have to wait — it will be “buffered” in the router’s memory, waiting its turn until the outgoing link is free.

Buffering lets the router deal with temporary surges in traffic. But if packets keep showing up faster than they can be sent out on some outgoing link, the number of buffered packets will grow and grow, and eventually the router will run out of buffer memory.

At that point, if one more packet shows up, the router has no choice but to discard a packet. It can discard the newly arriving packet, or it can make room for the new packet by discarding something else. But something has to be discarded.

Read the full article for a description of how this works out when considering high-priority versus low-priority traffic.

[tags]Network discrimination[/tags]

Australian copyright office as greedy as American big business

A nice little show of greed, as ripped from boingboing.

Australian schools may have to pay a copyright fee every time a student is told to look at the web, if a plan from the national collecting society is successful. The Copyright Agency pays Australian authors for the photocopying that takes place on schools by randomly sampling the schools annually, collecting $31 million in fees and dispersing them to authors.

Now they say that they deserve to collect for the use of the Web. Despite the fact that there’s an implied license to read Web pages that goes along with publishing them (who puts up a web-page without expecting it to be read?) and despite the fact that the vast majority of pages online weren’t created by Australians, and despite the fact that the vast majority of pages created by Australians weren’t created by professional authors, the agency proposes that it should be able to collect a tax on behalf of all those authors in the world in order to line the pockets of its few lucky members.

And the unfortunate but realistic response from a school representative.

“If it turned out we’d have to pay them, we’d turn the internet off in schools,” the council’s national copyright director Delia Browne said.

[tags]Australian copyright, greed[/tags]

Malware for sale

It had to happen sooner or later.

PandaLabs uncovers a complex malware creation system designed to spy and steal personal data

After Panda ActiveScan detected a malicious code designed to spy on infected computers and capture data, a complex espionage system has been uncovered

This system sells made-to-measure Trojans to hackers for US$ 990

Although this code is checked to avoid detection by different antivirus solutions,  TruPrevent™ Technologies have managed to detect it

The author’s website guarantees that if the Trojan is detect by an antivirus solution, it will be changed

I miss working in the security field.  I remember seeing predictions of this some time ago.  Of course, here is what these folks have to be asking now - is this something new, or has this been around a while and we’re just now finding it?  Also, one has to ask how the money transfer is taking place.  If someone is paying for this, there has to be an exchange of money somewhere.  I’m guessing that’s how people are going to try to track down the programmer in question.

I seriously doubt this is new, although it’s probably not a very old (in tech-world terms “mature”) service.  Still, this will likely grow more popular as other skilled programmers realize they can make real profits from doing bad.  But any that would offer a guarantee to reprogram said malware if it is discovered (as this one was) will have to charge more to stay ahead, fiscally speaking.  This is what you would call a growth industry, and like all growth industries, pricing will be high until it matures.  (via ArsTechnica)

[tags]Maleware, Virus for hire[/tags]

Politicians fail us again

This Washington Post article makes me sad.

Congress appeared ready to launch an investigation into the Bush administration’s warrantless domestic surveillance program last week, but an all-out White House lobbying campaign has dramatically slowed the effort and may kill it, key Republican and Democratic sources said yesterday.

I really expected this, but had thought we might have a few politicians might care about US citizens more than sucking up to the President and serving the party instead of the people.

And in case you think I’m just proposing removal of the current president, I want to point out that there are at least eight other politicians who need to be removed from office:

Before the New York Times disclosed the NSA program in mid-December, administration briefings regarding it were highly secret and limited to eight lawmakers: the top Republican and Democratic leader of the House and Senate, respectively, and the top Republican and Democrat on the House and Senate intelligence committees.

I don’t know who they are, but if none of them thought this insanely bad violation of the law was OK, then none of them deserve to remain in office.

John D. Rockefeller IV (D-W.Va.), the Senate intelligence committee’s vice chairman, has drafted a motion calling for a wide-ranging inquiry into the surveillance program, according to congressional sources who have seen it. Rockefeller declined to be interviewed yesterday.

Sources close to Rockefeller say he is frustrated by what he sees as heavy-handed White House efforts to dissuade Republicans from supporting his measure. They noted that Cheney conducted a Republicans-only meeting on intelligence matters in the Capitol yesterday.

I agree with Rockefeller.

Senate intelligence committee member Mike DeWine (R-Ohio) said in an interview that he supports the NSA program and would oppose a congressional investigation. He said he is drafting legislation that would “specifically authorize this program” by excluding it from the 1978 Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act, which established a secret court to consider government requests for wiretap warrants in anti-terrorist investigations.

What a surprise. He points out that he knows the spying is illegal. But he’s OK with that. Hey, if the President wants the power to legally carry out this spying, changing the law is the right thing to do. I don’t like it, but if the law allows it, I have to focus on fixing what I consider a bad law. Instead, the party line seems to be “Yes, it is illegal, but it is more important that we do this because we think it is right than we follow the law.” And that’s wrong.

In an interview yesterday, Snowe said, “I’m not sure it’s going to be essential or necessary” to conduct an inquiry “if we can address the legislative standpoint” that would provide oversight of the surveillance program. “We’re learning a lot and we’re going to learn more,” she said.

No. First, you change the law, then do the surveillance. Breaking the law, then proposing fixing it after you are caught should lead to removal from office. Then, the next president can benefit from your willingness to go to jail to set up their increased powers. But that won’t happen here.

[tags]NSA, illegal spying, corrupt politicians, impeachment, Bad President[/tags]

I heart Cory Doctorow

His writing is always excellent (to my easily impressed eyes, at least).  Recently on boing boing, Cory wrote a lengthy piece on why book publishers should be eager to hop in to bed with Google over the book scanning project instead of suing to stop it.

Here’s how GBS works: Google works with libraries to scan in millions of books, most (more than 75 percent) of them out-of-print, some out-of-copyright and some in-print/in-copyright. Google scans these books, converts the scanned images of the pages into text, and indexes the text.

This index will be exposed to the public, who will be able to search the full text of tens of millions of books — eventually this index could comprise the majority of books ever published — and get results back reporting on which books contain their search-terms.

For public domain books, the search-results will contain a link to the whole text of the book. These out-of-copyright works are our collective human property — or no one’s property at all — and Google is perfectly within its rights to distribute copies of any public-domain book that matches a search-request. As an author, I would love to be able to get the full-text of books that matched my search-queries.

For other books — the books that are in copyright — Google will show a brief excerpt: a single sentence with one or two sentences from either side of the the match. In some cases, publishers or other copyright holders have granted Google permission to show more than this — a couple pages — and Google will show you this, too.

The full article is about 20 times longer.

[tags]Cory Doctorow, Google Book Scanning project, Google, Boing Boing[/tags]

Bill would require web sites to delete personal information

I wanted to label this post “Proposed law would require web site operators to delete all unnecessary personal information” or something like that.  But the title is already long enough as it is, so I snipped a bit, and put the longer title in the body.  And now that you’ve read the overlong explanation of that useless information, head over to the full article.  Of course, the real question is, can our government actually make reasonable rules on what is and is not appropriate for web site operators to keep for business purposes?  Or something like that.

[tags]Web, personal information[/tags]

DRM (Digital Rights Management) helps honest users

Again with an Ars Technica link.  Here is a wonderful write-up by Caesar about the MPAAs claims that DRM is good for honest users.  I’m going to steal this great quote off the Ars page, too:

“Content owners use DRMs because it provides casual, honest users with guidelines for using and consuming content based on the usage rights that were acquired. Without the use of DRMs, honest consumers would have no guidelines and might eventually come to totally disregard copyright and therefore become a pirate, resulting in great harm to content creators,” he said.

In other words, people can’t be trusted to not steal, so we’re going to make stealing impossible.  Of course, DRM fails to do that.  But the people who weren’t going to steal in the first place, and therefore don’t need restrictions put on their media, aren’t going to be able to accidentally steal content.

[tags]DRM, MPAA, piracy[/tags]