Category: Technology

The Light Bulb Conspiracy: A Documentary

I spent part of yesterday evening watching a documentary called The Light Bulb Conspiracy about planned obsolescence and the pyramid of waste that it produces.

This film highlights the history of planned obsolescence starting with early light bulb production and leaving us with a legacy of mountains of waste in poorer nations. I’ve been troubled for some time by the way that we treat technology as a consumable using it and throwing it away, this is a salutary lesson:

Pyramids of Waste AKA The Light Bulb Conspiracy from Andreas Wagner on Vimeo.

Recommended by Simon Wardley.

The Freelancers are Already Marching

Following on from my piece The March of the Freelancers – the New York times has an article on the extent of freelancing focussing on the people who work online through online staffing agencies:

Recently two of the biggest online staffing companies, oDesk and Elance, have released surveys concerning the companies that hire workers over the Internet to do things like write software, and the mindset of online workers themselves.

Between them, oDesk and Elance claim to have more than four million coders, Web designers, marketing professionals and other workers. Some even spot porn on Facebook at a rate of four for a penny. In the second quarter of 2012, oDesk says, its contractors worked over 8.5 million hours, a 70 percent increase over a year earlier. The average freelancer at Elance, meantime, expects to make 43 percent more money in 2013, as more employers come online.

That’s lot of people working a lot of hours. Freelancing is already big business and getting bigger.

Would you tell that to a stranger? What do you share online?

People share the most amazing things online. We all need to learn a new way of thinking about our information, but perhaps a good place to start is to think about what we are sharing and whether we would give that information to a stranger.

I worry that we are giving people the most powerful tools but not really telling them how to safely use them.

October is European Cyber Security Month and this short video is aimed at making us think about what we share?

via Neelie Kroes.

Infographic: Working from Home

An interesting infographic on working from home with a collection of interesting statistics. I was particularly interested to see the split of people and where they think they are most productive – pretty much a third at home, a third in the office and third at either. For me, it depends on what I am doing at the time.

The Observer: 'I feel more fulfilled without the internet'

This weekend The Observer carried a really interesting article from Jake Davis who was banned from using the Internet because of his activities under the banner of “Internet Feds”, “Anonymous” and “LulzSec“.

If you are a reasonably regular visitor to this blog you’ll know that one of the themes that we return to quite regularly is the impact of modern technology on our brains and information addiction.

Jake has been banned from using the Internet and has been away from a keyboard for 12 months. His observations in the article are very interesting for anyone who spends a lot of their time using technology:

I’m often asked: what is life like without the net? It seems strange that humans have evolved and adapted for thousands of years without this simple connectivity, and now we in modern society struggle to comprehend existence without it. In a word, life is serene. I now find myself reading newspapers as though they weren’t ancient scrolls; entering real shops with real money in order to buy real products, and not wishing to Photoshop a cosmic being of unspeakable horror into every possible social situation. Nothing needs to be captioned or made into an elaborate joke to impress a citizenry whose every emotion is represented by a sequence of keystrokes.

It seems clear that Jake’s life was highly immersed in his Internet world and that removing the connection has allowed him to find a more serene place.

He goes on:

For it is our attention spans that have suffered the most. Our lives are compressed into short, advertisement-like bursts or “tweets”. The constant stream of drivel fills page after page, eating away at our creativity. If hashtags were rice grains, do you know how many starving families we could feed? Neither do I – I can’t Google it.

I’ve noticed this effect in my own attitudes and the attitudes of others. My ability to read for long periods has become severely impaired, and I have to make huge efforts to remove all of the distractions from around me if I’m going to focus on one particular thing.

In conclusion Jake says:

I hope, then, that others in a similar situation may decide to take a short break from the web (perhaps just for a week) and see if similar effects are found. It can’t hurt to try.

I try to make my holidays Internet free, but it’s increasingly difficult, it’s a practice I recommend to others, but see an ever-increasing number of people who find the disconnection too much to cope with.

Many years ago we recognised that using a keyboard too much and in the wrong position gave us RSI. In the UK we responded to this by implementing regular assessments of people’s workplace to try to avoid the physical problems. I wonder whether, in the future, we’ll do the same for the impact on our mental state.

How to design a meeting

Daniel W. Rasmus has started an interesting series of blog posts on the design of meetings, or more specifically, the design of meetings that use collaborative software. He introduces his first post in a series with these words:

Welsh WatersHow to Design a Meeting: Lesson 1

We all run meetings like we know what we’re doing. We have been to so many meetings we just know how to run them. What we really know is how to model and perpetuate the poor habits and practices of our mentors and coaches, managers and colleagues.  In the era of collaboration software our meetings need to be redesigned so they are driven through the collaboration environment in real-time, as the meeting takes place. Stop all the e-mails and document duplications, or even worse, handouts and get people to engage in a collaborative way through a meeting environment that captures all of the content, the tasks and the decisions in one view (not necessarily, as you will read, in one place).

The other day I finished work exhausted. As I sat and considered what I had achieved that day I realised that I had spent most of it in meetings, but what had I achieved? Honestly, precious little. Why was that? Well, and this is where I might be getting a bit too personal for some, boredom tires me out, and I’d spent much of the day bored.

I’m not saying that meetings are boring, but I am suggesting that many of the meetings that I attend are boring. Sometimes meetings need to happen that are in their very make-up dull, the context and the subject makes it difficult to make them interesting. These are the minority of meetings though, many meetings with interesting content are made colourless by the way that we run them. We spend so much of our time in meetings we should care that they are effective. If a meeting is effective it, at least, has a chance of not being boring.

I need to hold my hands up here and apologise for the drab meetings that I’ve run too, there’s a lot I need to learn, relearn and unlearn. Daniel has provided an infographic of where he is going with the series, I’ll read with interest:

Problems Solving Pleasures

Technical problems annoy me, especially ones that I think I should be able to fix.

Over the last few months I’ve had a driver problem on the laptop I use for work. It wasn’t a serious problem because it didn’t stop me working, but it was highly annoying. It’s main symptom was that it stopped me using any of the power features – I couldn’t put the laptop into sleep or suspend with any reliability. Sometimes it would sleep, at other times it would just die. When it did sleep, the second time I tried it would die. What’s more it would die in dramatic fashion, no errors, nothing, just dead.

Crow Park SunsetAt the start of every work session I would have to start my laptop, and at the end of the session I would have to shut it down. Between meetings I would have to carry it with the lid open so that it wouldn’t try to go to sleep, and die.

I don’t deal with real technology much these days, I spend most of my time with the documents that talk about what the technology is going to do. But I still love the pleasure of solving a problem.

I’d tried all sorts of ways of resolving this problem, but with little information it was difficult to work out where the problem was. A colleague of mine had exactly the same device and we compared drivers – they were identical.

It happened for so long that the habit of starting up and shutting down got engrained, but it still irked me that this problem persisted.

One day last week something happened when I accidentally put the device into sleep and it died at normal, but this time it died with a crash dump. Now I had something to go on, out came all of the old crash dump analysis skills. I found the likely driver, realised that it was from some software I no longer used in my current role. The software and it associated driver was duly deleted and the problem was fixed.

Every time I close the lid on my laptop now I give a little smile at the pleasure of a problem solved. There’s something very satisfying about solving a problem.

Make your password complex or long

I suspect that this isn’t really news to most of the people who read this blog, but all the same it’s very important.

Chipping Vale after the stormYahoo recent experienced a security breach which resulted in a lot of people’s passwords being exposed – 450,000 in all.

David Harley over on betanews highlights some statistics put together by Anders Nilsson. What these statistics show is that people still use the most basic of passwords:

  1. 123456 = 1666 (0.38%)
  2. password = 780 (0.18%)
  3. welcome = 436 (0.1%)
  4. ninja = 333 (0.08%)
  5. abc123 = 250 (0.06%)
  6. 123456789 = 222 (0.05%)
  7. 12345678 = 208 (0.05%)
  8. sunshine = 205 (0.05%)
  9. princess = 202 (0.05%)
  10. qwerty = 172 (0.04%)

In other words, with these Top 10 password you get access to 1% of people accounts. That might not sound like a lot but out of the 450,000 password leaked that’s access to 4,500 people’s information, without even trying. Just think how much money that might be if it was 4,500 bank accounts.

The statistics on password length are equally poor:

Password length (length ordered)

  • 1 = 117 (0.03%)
  • 2 = 70 (0.02%)
  • 3 = 302 (0.07%)
  • 4 = 2748 (0.62%)
  • 5 = 5323 (1.2%)
  • 6 = 79610 (17.98%)
  • 7 = 65598 (14.82%)
  • 8 = 119125 (26.9%)
  • 9 = 65955 (14.9%)
  • 10 = 54756 (12.37%)

In other words, nearly 20% (19.62%) of people have a password that is 6 characters long or fewer.

I’ve recently had a number of conversations with people about security of email and twitter accounts. In every instance the people blamed Google, Microsoft or Twitter. When I asked them what their password was a number of them told me straight out, of those that told me all of them were short and simple (also, if someone does ask you your password – don’t tell them).

Length of password and complexity of password are both import, but one comes as a result of the other.

Rather that trying to remember a different password for each of the things that I use I have a different regime depending upon how important the site is. There are lots of places that ask for a password for which there would be very limited impact on me if it was revealed. This password is still reasonably long and reasonably complex, but it’s the same one for all of these sites. There are then a small set of sites that are really important to me and the impact of loosing the password would be significant, I treat these completely differently. They have their own password, they have long complex passwords, and I change them reasonably regularly. This regime enables me to focus my attention on the important things.

Other people I know use a password management tool which, itself, generates strong hidden passwords. Examples of these are lastpass and 1Password.

It doesn’t mater how you do it but please make your passwords longer and more complex.

One day in the future passwords won’t be such an issue, but until then…

My changing workplace – part 4: Connecting across the 90's

With the advent of the networked world, we have moved from the ability to reach people when we want to speak to them, to a world where we are connected to people even when we aren’t paying attention

Daniel W. Rasmus

The computing world has always involved networks, but they have radically changed and the 1990’s was a time of technology explosion and subsequent consolidation as the network became the utility service that we expect today.

Today I sit in an office and there are three networks available to me. There’s a wired network using Cat 5 UTP Ethernet, there’s a wireless network using Wi-Fi and there’s also the packet based 3G network that my phone and Kindle are using.

Each of these networks is using TCP/IP as the transport protocol.

(This desk also happens to have an analogue phone connected that’s also using the UTP flood-wiring, but that’s a legacy of when it was built.)

Everywhere I go I expect one of these three connections to be available. What’s more I expect my connection to connect me to everything (the only exception to this is that I’m in my corporate office and there are restrictions on which sites I can access on the Internet).

I expect to be able to connect to a network and get working quickly without having to reconfigure anything. As I wander around my mobile phone connects to different networks without me having to do anything.

These local connections provide me with high speed connections to other places including the other side of the world.

To print – I use the network.

Storing data – I use the network.

Finding information – I use the network.

Communication – I use the network.

I connect to the network, there’s only one of them.

At the start of the 1990’s the network’s job was to provide connections from a terminal to the central computer. There was limited connectivity between systems, but that was all about to change.

In the mid-to-late-90’s the consolidation to a standard way of doing things was already well on it’s way, but there was still a good deal of work to do.

We already had a number of ways of connecting things. There was the IBM SNA network that provided terminal connections to the IBM Mainframe. There were numerous thin-wire Ethernet networks providing access to the Digital VAX services running DECNet. There were other thin-wire Ethernet networks connecting various UNIX devices together. There was even some token-ring networks connecting PCs together (which had some of the most robust plugs anyone could wish to have) and running the LAN Manager protocol NETBEUI. There were also some Ethernet networks running IPX for Netware and connected even more PCs. The Mac’s ran AppleTalk. There were even some PCs running DECNet and DEC Pathworks.

Between sites there were X.25 and SNA connections.

There were a whole load of printer switch-boxes that connected multiple PCs to HP LaserJet and InkJet printers via their parallel ports.

In summary, a whole mishmash of connections and connection types. There were islands of connectivity all over the place.

Many of these connections would still be needed in the future, and that’s where emulation software came in. For part of my life I became the world’s expert in IBM terminal emulation software, a vital skill that is no longer needed, a cul-de-sac I’m glad I decided to move out of.

At some point in the early 90’s I went to Manchester University to talk to them about a new way of displaying information – Hypertext Mark-up Language (HTML). It was displayed using an application called Mosaic, you would type in a funny address (URL) and wait for the page to display, eventually. Mosaic was soon to be replaced by Netscape and then by early versions of Internet Explorer. We also looked at a way of retrieving information called Gopher that went off and found articles from universities around the country. Gopher was soon to be replaced by a new company called Google. The university was connected to the JANET network which was already connected to other networks using TCP/IP and routers, a network that we would come to know as the Internet.

At home I had a PC with a modem connected to it. The modem would connect to a service called Compuserve. It was only really good for two things, a limited form of email and bulletin boards. Some people jumped onto the AOL bandwagon, but for me it was the free ISP Freeserve that pulled me into the Internet age. My laptops still has a modem built into it, I have no idea why.

At some point in the latter 90’s my Grandma came to visit. She wanted to know what this thing called email was, she’d heard about it on the television. I decided that the best way to explain was to demonstrate. So I started the computer, typed in the email address of my brother who was working on a cruise liner somewhere near the Bahamas and composed a short message. Having clicked on the send button and listened to the modem kick into action, I explained to her that it was just like the normal mail only down the telephone line. She was almost OK with this explanation. What completely blew her away though was the reply that I received from my brother before I’d disconnected. She knew that my brother was at sea, so how did the message get to him? As Arthur C. Clarke said:

Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic.

Sun had the slogan "The Network is the Computer" but only the most visionary of thinkers can have imagined what was ahead. But any computer is only useful if we can interact with it, and we normally interact using applications and applications were also going through a massive change. That will, however, have to wait until next time.

My changing workplace:

The Move to Mobile (in the UK)

Google has made a new set of data available at their Our Mobile Planet site covering research into the use of smartphones for 2012:

image

The site contains a set of reports on mobile usage by country, but also makes the entire dataset of the research available as both a file and also via an interactive charting tool.

Being from the UK I was particularly interested in the report for here which has the following observations in its Executive Summary:

  • Smartphones have become an indispensable part of our daily lives
  • Smartphones have transformed consumer behaviour
  • Smartphones help users navigate the world
  • Smartphones have changed the way consumers shop
  • Smartphones help advertisers connect with consumers

There are a number of really interesting statistics too:

  • Smartphone penetration has grown from 30% in 2011 to 51% in 2012
  • 78% of smartphone owners don’t leave home without their device
  • 72% of smartphone owners use them at work
  • 64% of smartphone owners access the Internet at least once a day and emailing is still the most popular usage
  • 21% would rather give up the TV than their smartphone
  • 80% of people use their smartphone while doing other things, 55% of them while watching the TV
  • and many more…

This would ring true from what I am seeing out-and-about, and the observations are similar across the globe.

Here’s one of the charts for men of my age group and the importance of the smartphone, 74% won’t leave home without their phone and 20% would rather give up their computer than give up their smartphone:

ourmobileplanet.com_chart_1a584681