Category Archives: digital home

Adieu, Britannica print

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When I was just starting out with living in my own apartment after grad school, one of the things that I packed up from my parents’ house was the 1940s-era printed version of Encyclopedia Britannica. Yesterday, the company announced they were discontinuing the printing of future versions and going strictly online. I had to pause for a moment in its memory, as yet another icon from my childhood slips away.

It was a curious thing for my parents to have. Back in the day, people sold encyclopedias door-to-door, and you bought them on a monthly plan, just like we buy expensive items like cars today. When I was growing up, printed encyclopedias were our go-to reference material. Many students copied pages from them verbatim for their book reports, instilling at an early age a generation of plagiarists. Now we can do our copying with a few mouse clicks, and the teachers have a variety of online tools to check to see where our supposedly original work came from. Such is progress.

Having a 25 year old reference work at home at the time was interesting, making researching history almost amusing (we also had about a dozen of the “yearbooks” which were annual updates to supplement the set). But it instilled an early thirst for knowledge and gave me the motivations to do proper research, something that is the bedrock of my current career.

In my adult years as I moved about from one place to another the 100-plus pounds of books traveled with me, virtually never opened for casual browsing. I guess I just wanted them nearby. The set crossed the country twice as I moved to Los Angeles, then to New York. Finally, I realized that I had to give up this totem of my past and thought that I could sell the set to a library or a collector. Alas, they were worthless, even back in the pre-Wikipedia, pre-Web era, and they went off to be recycled.

Certainly, the first reaction of many of you of a younger age about Britannica’s print demise would be something on the order of “took them long enough” or some such snarky sentiment. After all, why have a printed work of anything that changes, and where the online version can be continuously updated? And where Wikipedia, which is the sixth most visited website, can be accessed for free? Well, indeed. How many casual arguments about statements of fact have ever been settled by someone promising to go to the library to look something up in an encyclopedia, when the same such information can be quickly accessed on one’s phone?

The idea of a scholarly reference work that was prepared by experts in its field started its transformation shortly after the Web became popular in the early 1990s. Actually, the Web had some early competition for knowledge repositories: Microsoft began its own CD-ROM based encyclopedia Encarta in 1993, but it didn’t last very long. And Britannica was ahead of its time when it came to adopting the Web: it has been online since 1995, which pre-dated Wikipedia’s entry to the Web by several years. There is even an iPad version of Britannica for $2 a month.

Nature, the British science magazine, did a study back in 2005 where they chose selected articles from both the online Britannica and Wikipedia and asked a panel of their own experts to identify any errors without telling them which source they were looking at. They found more than a hundred mistakes in both works, with more errors in Wikipedia. Ironically, the original article is behind their paywall and will cost you $35 to read.

If you are really nostalgic, you can be one of 4,000 to own the last edition of the print version of Britannica. It can be had for a mere $1400, and according to press reports only 8,000 copies were ever sold, mostly to libraries. Or if you want to go back into time, I found about 90 different sellers of earlier editions on eBay (most of these sellers won’t accept returns, no surprise). In the meantime, if you want to do your own comparison and fact checking ala Nature, you can access Britannica for the next week free of charge. Normally, access to the online Britannica.com costs $70 the first year. Finding pricing information on their website isn’t easy.

Perhaps it is fitting that we write about this news today, the birth date of Einstein (you can look it up).

Feel free to share your own encyclopedia memories here as well. Adieu, Britannica print.

How Banks Can Text You Fraud Alerts in Real Time

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Like some of you, I was in the market to buy a new phone late last year, and went online to the AT&T store to make my purchase the day or so after the new iPhone 4S was available. Smart, I thought to myself: avoid the lines (not that there are many lines here in St. Louis, but still). Took about five minutes to enter all my information and then I was done. I got a confirmation email that my order had been placed, and an estimated ship date a few weeks away. That was fine: I wasn’t in a hurry.

But then there were a bizarre series of circumstances. My order was summarily cancelled by AT&T. I thought at first that there was something wrong with my credit card, so I tried a debit card. Same process: initial confirmation emails followed by a cancelled order. That was perplexing. Now I was getting steamed: a simple five-minute process to avoid the hassles was turning into a project. What gives? It turns out that I have a fraud alert on my credit card, due to some ID theft circumstances a few years ago. And apparently, when you purchase something from AT&T online, they don’t have any way to check with you out of band to see if that purchase was legit. Or so I guessed.

If you have ever had one of your purchases challenged by your bank or credit provider, then you might want to watch this video showing you what Clairmail is doing with its mobile fraud prevention system. You can’t buy this as an individual: they sell just to banks and other financial institutions. Watch this short video explanation:

[youtube http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=btX1rxZtg1o]

But you get the idea: they send you text messages when suspicious activity is flagged on your account, in real time, while you are in the store, about to make the purchase. No more awkward moments hearing that your card has been declined because you failed to alert your bank that you are traveling overseas, or because you placed a fraud alert marker on your account. A quick text to confirm that it is indeed an intended purchase and you are good to go.

Clairmail has “hit a home run” with their mobile solution, according to Sean Mulvihill, the VP of Sales and Marketing Operations for the company. Their software is found in many of the nation’s top banks and they have other products that enable banks to white-label online services for an entire secure mobile Web app. I just wish my bank were one of their customers.

Take a FOMO break this holiday season

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Are you one of those people that aren’t satisfied with the number of
your Facebook friends, even if you have more than the average number
of 190 as I mentioned in an article last week for ReadWriteWeb.

Are you always checking your Facebook page to see what your friends are doing?

Do you get the feeling you are missing out on something big when you
choose to stay home rather than get all dolled up for a night out on
the town?

If so, you might be suffering from FOMO, for fear of missing out. This
isn’t a new phenomenon, and has been extensively quoted in a number of
blogs and newspapers, including an article in last week’s New York
Times. But as we move into the end of year holidays, it can be a
bigger issue.

“If you’re honest, the things you miss out on don’t always sound as
amazing as other people say they are,” says Sophia Dembling writing on
Psychology Today’s blog. She goes on to talk about how social media,
like many things, is both the creator and the cure for FOMO.

Perhaps some of it is just envy. Just as in middle school, we want to
be among the popular group, the trendsetters. This reminds me of the
Morrissey video, We Hate It When Our Friends Become Successful. (A
modern musical version, perhaps, of this maxim by François VI, Duc de
La Rochefoucauld: “In the misfortunes of our friends, we take no small
pleasure.”) Of course, in middle school back in the day, I was more
outcast than popular. I was the kid getting picked on out in the
playground during recess. Nerds hadn’t even become a key stakeholder
group back then.

In another RWW article asking about how often you are on Facebook, the
number of people who check their Facebook pages hourly surprised me,
meaning that it was too low an estimate.

In my experience, it is almost continuous monitoring for the
20-somethings that I know. It is now de rigueur to place your phones
on the table when you go out to eat, so they can be available at a
moment’s notice. This indicates to me that someone would rather not be
present, no matter where they are.

Back in the olden times when we didn’t have cell phones, restaurants
brought landline phones over to your table when you were expecting an
important call. Only movie moguls did this, however.

So here are some suggestions for taking a holiday break. Close the
laptop. Set your phone on vibrate. Go read a book and enjoy the
solitude. Or go someplace new with a friend, and just focus on each
other. Watch a movie and really focus on what is going on with it.
Live in the moment and enjoy what you are doing. Even for just a few
minutes each day.

Call it a FOMO break. But before you do, please take a moment to add a
comment or thought here.
Best wishes for a happy and healthy holiday season.

Siri, pour me a beer!

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beeri.pngThe history of nerds and automating their potables goes back a long way, even before claims about who invented the Internet. The latest chapter has been written with the geeks from RedPepper. They have invented Beeri, the first Siri interface for pouring a beer. Or, as its creators say, “the thought leader of beer pouring.” This is just the latest dream job for Siri, it seems.

The Rube Goldbergish process goes something like this. Siri is used to text the words “pour me a beer” to Beeri’s Twitter account. Meanwhile, the onboard Arduino Uno processor (which we have written about here at RWW) is polling this account, and when it sees the command pop up in the Beeri Twitter feed, it sends the remote controlled vehicle crashing into the wall in RedPepper’s lab and the beer can is opened and beer collected in the glass. Of course, Beeri 2.0 will figure out a way to do this with a refrigerated can, or to be able to refill the contraption.

[vimeo http://www.vimeo.com/30892539 w=600&h=355]

Beeri is just the latest in a long line of Internet-connected devices that quench thirsty nerds. Of course, back in the day we didn’t know from Twitter or used any wimpy Wifi, but had RS-232 serial cables and standard Ethernet over coax. Back in the 1970s, the grad computer science students at Carnegie Mellon connected their department’s Coke machine to the Internet so they could “finger” (in the protocol sense, for those of you thinking nasty thoughts) the machine and determine the location of the coldest soda cans. And then there were the grad students at the University of Cambridge UK that connected their coffee pot to the Internet .

Facebook, the new AOL

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Remember the last time when an Internet site tried to be all things to all people, limit the way that they accessed their content, and tried to make themselves into the default go-to platform for social networking? Yes, Facebook has aspirations to become the new AOL.

This week’s F8 announcements are certainly exciting for Facebook, extending the site into just about every nook and cranny of our lives. But here’s the rub: it could be going too far. Do we want to really be that social? It is ironic that the service is developed by the most anti-social beings on the planet, those nerds that code by night, stay home by day, and whose preferred method of communications is typing, not talking f2f (face to face, if you have to ask).

So would you rather have your social networking as a platform, FaaP as it were, where it is part of the warp and weft of your Internet experience, baked into everything that you do? (Okay, enough metaphors.) For those over-sharers that post 34 status updates each hour, yes, yes, and more yes. But for the rest of us, who want some balance in our lives, the choice is to layer social networking on top of our existing Internet pathways that have been well worn into our computers. This “front end” social networking is what Microsoft and Google and the rest of the vendors are counting on, with Google+ most notably but with hundreds of others from Cisco’s Quad to Salesforce Chatter to IBM’s Connections trying to almost desperately add that social context to their products. Soon, your IT staff will have a social network to share amongst them tips on how to best configure their firewalls, and so forth. (Note to potential investors: I have the term sheet almost finished.)

When I stated using Google+, I noticed that all of my Picasa photo albums were shared with my peeps. Now, many of the photos in there aren’t all that exciting, such as screenshots that I took for many of the articles that I have written. But some of them are personal and private, and I raced around clicking here and there to ensure that they would stay that way. That was an early consequence of over-sharing for me. And there are going to be plenty more as Facebook turns on this new feature and that. They never have been very respectful of my – or your — privacy. And perhaps all these complaints are just sour grapes; I still have fewer friends than my 20-something daughter, and probably always will. (She was and still is one of the Popular Kids. I was and still am a nerd.) But at least now I don’t feel as bad about it.

So the choice is clear: login to Facebook and be more open about your life’s choices. Or get left behind with the non-social Internet and become an online hermit. I want more choices; it shouldn’t have to be as binary as that. It seems like that’s where we are now.

But if enough of us opt out, Facebook could become like AOL in a few years: an overgrown walled garden that no one wants to visit. Instead of a quaint anachronism of people who still use dial-up modems and like using a 90’s-era Webmail service, we’ll have those over-social folks that spend their days with their updates on Farmville.

Remembering 911

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(This post was originally written in 2011, then updated in 2018 and then again in 2021.)

With the wall-to-wall 911 coverage this week, I wanted to take a moment to go back in time to that fateful day ten years ago. Back then, I had just released my second book on home networking and was about to embark on a series of book tours to promote it. The tour never happened. I was living on Long Island and that morning I was out on a bike ride to the end of the peninsula that had a view of the Manhattan skyline. I didn’t know that I was seeing the collapse of the buildings from my vantage point 25 miles away. I lost two acquaintances that day; Tom Kelly, a firefighter that I had done several charity bike rides and Mark Bingham, who was on the plane that went down in Pennsylvania. It took me months to visit the site, and I posted this entry in March 2002. I thought you might want to read what I had written then:

I went down to the former World Trade Center site this week, for the first time since 9/11. It was a dark and stormy night, with an almost surreal atmosphere of ground fog and occasional rain showers. A utility pipe venting steam into the street nearby added to the almost movie-set-like feeling around the dark and deserted streets.

I have been reluctant to return here, an area that I visited often on business and tourist reasons throughout my tenure as a New Yorker. The twin towers were a favorite destination for my family for showing off the city to out of town guests, as well as a place for me to go to power breakfasts for various computer industry events.

Thomas R. Kelly "Tommy"I have been back in the neighborhood several times since the disaster, not as a tourist but as a volunteer to help prepare meals for the construction and police crews working there. And while many friends of mine went to see the site in the days after the disaster, I couldn’t bring myself to go. I didn’t want to see what had happened. After losing Tom R. Kelly from Ladder 105, I didn’t want to approach the area without some further reflection and respect for all of those who perished. It was enough for me to view the skyline from afar, and note the gap, like some extracted tooth from my child’s smile.

But this week I was ready to see what things looked like, and pay my respects. I had dinner with a friend of mine who lives in Battery Park on a high floor, with huge picture windows facing the site. He and his wife watched the buildings crumble that day, and they offered me to come to their apartment and see the view for myself. Until this week, I wasn’t really ready to take them up on their offer.

But once I got to their place, I was glad I came. The foggy evening highlighted the twin searchlight banks that have been setup as a memorial a few blocks away from where the actual towers were located. Their lights cast an eerie glow around the neighborhood, and from above it seemed like you were looking down onto the tops of the towers themselves — the same square patterns of the buildings external skins have been reproduced in the lights. It is a fitting tribute to the people who lost their lives that day, to the strength and determination of the people of this country, and to two huge buildings that are gone forever.

Ironically, their apartment building stands on the landfill that was removed from the original construction site to build the trade center complex many years ago. The site and nearby streets were all under the Hudson River waterline, and to get down to the actual bedrock to build the site required creating this huge “bathtub” retaining wall to keep the water out. The wall is all that remains of that effort, and it is a massive task to ensure its structural integrity, now that the buildings and vast underground complex have been removed.

From my friends’ apartment, you could see the movement of the construction vehicles as workers continue to excavate the site, and they are still working round the clock. There was just one area left — the area of the compressed south tower. The rest was a big hole, reminiscent of the Tyco crater scene in the movie “2001,” lit up with its own array of lights. Like the movie, we are still searching for answers to why this happened. Instead of an alien life, we have other humans who were so determined to harm thousands of us.

I still have lots of complex feelings about the events around 9/11, and I am still sorting them out — as I am sure, you are too. Looking at the lights, I remembered my friend’s Tom’s contribution, and honor his memory and his fellow firefighters and the many others who didn’t make it that day.

NB: I wrote this many years ago, and in December 2018 I returned to the site, now a bustling tourist location with the two memorial pools and a new museum along with the tall Freedom Tower dominating the site. I took this photo of Tom’s name etched into the memorial on another rainy day. Just as I did, a blast of wind sent a stream of mist up in the air and enveloped our family group that had come to see the memorial. I think Tom was crying with us.

N.B #2: 

I am writing this in 2021. My posts from the past above still bring back some raw memories. There are also a flood of memorial films for this particular anniversary. I have been watching the NatGeo/Hulu series, which is an amazing piece of journalism, linking images of many of the heroes from that day with contemporary interviews. One of them is an interview with Mark Bingham’s mother. and highlights his role in thwarting the hijackers. The series shows the level of heroism from both those who survived and those who perished.

The passage of time has claimed another man named Tom W. Kelly, a firefighter from the Bronx Ladder 15 who developed cancer from his work trying to rescue people trapped in the rubble of the trade center. This brings the total of Toms to three that were claimed from 9/11.

Stop sharing files in public spaces, puh-leeze

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I have been on the road a lot this summer, which is always the worst time of year to travel. But one thing I have noticed is that increasingly, many laptop-toting travelers are inadvertently sharing their files when they are on the hotel or airport or coffee shop WiFi.

So here is a short security tip: when you get ready to leave for your next trip, take the two minutes and turn off your file sharing.

Granted, most people aren’t so nosy, or even know how to probe your computer, but why take the chance?

What is amazing is how poorly some hotel and airport networks are constructed, making one big flat space that everyone can see everyone else connected. In some places, there are dozens of computers visible that have sharing turned on.

For those that don’t remember, on the Mac it is System Preferences/ File Sharing. On Windows 7 you can set up different kinds of networks and make it permanent, go to Control Panel/Network and Internet/Network Sharing Center/Advanced sharing settings and then turn off the various options for network discovery, file and print sharing, and public folder sharing for public networks. This way, you can keep sharing on your corporate network and not have to fool with this setting when you travel. On earlier versions of Windows, you will have to turn it off when you travel just like the Mac. You can also go into the wireless network connection property sheet and uncheck the file and printer sharing and Microsoft networking client boxes too.

I know I have been guilty of this myself, and usually am reminded of this when I see the long list of open file servers in my Mac’s Finder window.

There are lots of other steps you can take to make your wireless computing safer, including using a strong firewall (the Win7 built-in one is better than earlier built-in versions) and don’t automatically connect to any available hotspot. And use encryption on your own hotspots at home and in the office, to keep others out.

For more commentary about wireless security issues, check out this piece by Lisa Phifer here from 2008. While old, it is still relevant.

What the Cell Phone Spoofing/UK Scandal Means to You

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So the news this week is filled with ever-changing horror about how various reporters in the Murdoch’s News Corp. “hacked” into the cell phone voice mail accounts of prominent Britons. What exactly does this mean, and why should you care?

The hacking was minimal at best: apparently, reporters asked their shift editor to make calls using a phone spoofing service to the cell of the intended victim. These services can be set up to use any specified caller ID, so once a mobile number is known, it is easy to obtain your voicemail. Since most cell phones allow immediate access to your voicemail from your own calling number without any password or PIN number. Three of the four US cellular carriers operate this way – only Verizon requires all subscribers to use a PIN on their voicemail accounts.

In the past, many of us guarded our cell numbers for financial reasons: plans cost a lot for few minutes. But as cell plans got more generous with their minutes, and as more carriers made mobile-to-mobile minutes “free,” more of us have given out our cell numbers on our business cards and in our email signatures.

So what is involved with spoofing your cell number? The market is huge, and the number of sites that offer this “service” seem somewhat like walking past the part of town where merchandise is offered for sale on blankets along the sidewalk. Basically, you sign up for a service (there are some free ones around, too). Next, you dial an access number for the service and then enter the number you want to call and then the caller id number you want to be displayed. Most services have simple voice prompts. When your call is completed, your party will see the caller ID that you entered, rather than the “real” calling number of your phone.

Once someone accesses your voicemail, there is really no way you can know it, unless they delete your messages. Most services have a way to mark a message as unread after it has been listened to.

If you want to know more about caller ID spoofing, check out this Web site which has a nice historical perspective.

Skype Out has had for a long time the ability to adjust its caller ID, but it goes through a series of checks to make sure that you at least own (or have in your possession at the time) the mobile phone number that you give it for this service.

The moral of the story: If you care about your voicemail security, use a PIN. And preferably not 1234 or 2000 or something that is easily guessed.

Take a SysAdmin to Lunch on the 29th

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Yes, it is time for the twelfth annual SysAdminDay coming up in two weeks. I must have missed the first eleven of them somehow, but I plan on celebrating in style this time around.

Stay tuned for the contest details at the end of this post.

Yes, those underappreciated folks that build your servers, debug your SQL code to keep it from getting injected, reroute your network cables, balance your loads, and all the other tasks to keep your applications infrastructure humming along. I was never a sysadmin, although I did do my fair share of tech support back in the days of DOS. We had our share of people who didn’t turn computers on (or even plug them in), users formatting their drives to see what happens, and people sending us photocopies of their floppies when we asked them to see what was wrong with the disks.

I just love the SysAdmin Day website above, it is a great time waster. There you can find gift suggestions to give your favorite SysAdmin (ThinkGeek is all over this sort of thing, rightly so, down to their LED Blade Runner-style umbrellas), humor, video clips. You can spend your time checking out their rogue’s gallery of bad cabling installations and cartoons, along with clips from previous year’s celebrations. Missing is my favorite TV show, “The IT Crowd” that ran on BBC awhile back. (Season 2 is the best.)

But lately, things are not so much fun and games anymore. The Internet is a dark place, where evil lurks on every router junction and underneath each seemingly harmless Acrobat file. You can get infected from just visiting a Web site, let alone downloading anything from it. You can’t be running an old browser version, because there are people Out There who will take advantage of your ancient software and send you nice little exploits that will live on your hard drive and make your life miserable. You can’t be too careful, which is why it is time to appreciate your favorite SysAdmin in a couple of weeks.

So here’s my deal. Those of you who live within a few hundred miles of the St. Louis area and would like to qualify for a free lunch, I am serious, send me a note and tell me your most outrageous end user support story, suitable for framing and posting around the Interwebs. The funniest one wins lunch. If you don’t live nearby, you can still enter the contest and I will take you out to lunch when I am next in your city, or when our Foursquare check-ins next intersect in meatspace. Decision of the judges is final, and not valid in Alaska. Post your comments right here.