Found this today

Groupware Bad
from here (Google, Pandas, and Lobsters)

Now the problem here is that the product’s direction changed utterly. Our focus in the client group had always been to build products and features that people wanted to use. That we wanted to use. That our moms wanted to use.

“Groupware” is all about things like “workflow”, which means, “the chairman of the committee has emailed me this checklist, and I’m done with item 3, so I want to check off item 3, so this document must be sent back to my supervisor to approve the fact that item 3 is changing from `unchecked’ to `checked’, and once he does that, it can be directed back to committee for review.”

…
If you want to do something that’s going to change the world, build software that people want to use instead of software that managers want to buy.

….make it trivially easy for someone to….

Good point, too often overlooked.

Just 48 days after Microsoft began selling the Kin, a smartphone for the younger set, the company discontinued it because of disappointing sales.

via Microsoft Kin Discontinued After 48 Days – NYTimes.com.

All I can say is ‘Wow, that is really embarrassing’.

Ben Adida writes:

Privacy Advocacy Theater

May 27, 2010 @ 1:58 pm

I like this idea.  He then discusses what he calls advocacy theatre:

I want to focus on a related problem that I’ll call privacy advocacy theater. This is a problem that my friends and colleagues are guilty of, and I’m sure I’m guilty of it at times, too. Privacy Advocacy Theater is the act of extreme criticism for an accidental data breach rather than a systemic privacy design flaw. Example: if you’re up in arms over the Google Street View privacy “fiasco” of the last few days, you’re guilty of Privacy Advocacy Theater. (If you’re generally worried about Google Street View, that’s a different problem, there are real concerns there, but I’m only talking about the collection of wifi network payload data Google performed by mistake.)

On a technical level, Ben follows up:

devices, payload data, and why Kim is (in part) right.

June 1, 2010 @ 8:19 pm

A few days ago, I wrote about privacy advocacy theater and lamented how some folks, including EPIC and Kim Cameron, are attacking Google in a needlessly harsh way for what was an accidental collection of data. Kim Cameron responded, and he is right to point out that my argument, in the Google case, missed an important issue.

Kim points out that two issues got confused in the flurry of press activity: the accidental collection of payload data, i.e. the URLs and web content you browsed on unsecured wifi at the moment the Google Street View car was driving by, and the intentional collection of device identifiers, i.e. the network hardware identifiers and network names of public wifi access points. Kim thinks the network identifiers are inherently more problematic than the payload, because they last for quite a bit of time, while payload data, collected for a few randomly chosen milliseconds, are quite ephemeral and unlikely to be problematic.

Kim’s right on both points. Discussion of device identifiers, which I missed in my first post, is necessary, because the data collection, in this case, was intentional, and apparently was not disclosed, as documented inEPIC’s letter to the FCC. If Google is collecting public wifi data, they should at least disclose it. In their blog post on this topic, Google does not clarify that issue.

I enjoyed the way of thinking here in addition to the issues discussed.

I sit here on a Dell Optiplex 755 and wonder.

According to company memorandums and other documents recently unsealed in a civil case against Dell in Federal District Court in North Carolina, Dell appears to have suffered from the bad capacitors, made by a company called Nichicon, far more than its rivals. Internal documents show that Dell shipped at least 11.8 million computers from May 2003 to July 2005 that were at risk of failing because of the faulty components. These were Dell’s OptiPlex desktop computers — the company’s mainstream products sold to business and government customers.

A study by Dell found that OptiPlex computers affected by the bad capacitors were expected to cause problems up to 97 percent of the time over a three-year period, according to the lawsuit.

As complaints mounted, Dell hired a contractor to investigate the situation. According to a Dell filing in the lawsuit, which has not yet gone to trial, the contractor found that 10 times more computers were at risk of failing than Dell had estimated. Making problems worse, Dell replaced faulty motherboards with other faulty motherboards, according to the contractor’s findings.

…

Carey Holzman, a computer expert who investigated the capacitor problems and collected photos from people with broken motherboards, had a different take on the safety situation.

“Of course it’s dangerous,” Mr. Holzman said. “Having leaking capacitors is a huge problem.” He found that the capacitor problems could cause computers to catch fire [emphasis added -BF].

Our Solar System in Safari and Chrome (webkit browsers)

(In my FF3 it looks right, but doesn’t animate).

But IE has a slightly boxier rendering… (confirmed with IE7 on my machine).

Web standards need to be a bit more standard… if we’re to go to infinity and beyond.

H/T kottke

OReilly Radar – Insight, analysis, and research about emerging technologies.

via Analysis: Three privacy initiatives from the Office of Management and Budget.

Will have to read this more carefully later. Tackles privacy, social networking, authentication, cookies..

(sorry for the title..)

My office is behind the iPhone store on Michigan, so I always know when Apple bestows on the world a new product. Leaving work last night around 5pm, I saw a line already around the block, and iPhone employees handing out umbrellas for protection against the tornado-warning weather.

This morning, the line was zigzaging back an forth so much, I really have no concept of how big it was or where it ends, but clearly, something important has arrived.

Some other articles:

How many American jobs will Steve Jobs destroy?

Or look at the app review process. The problem with how Apple does this is there’s no guarantee that an app you build will ever see the light of day. The problem is, if you can’t be sure to be able to bring your app to market, can you afford to waste a year of your time building a substantial piece of code?

Many developers can’t and most developers shouldn’t. This is why there are so many silly iPhone and iPad apps, and why there are very few exceptional apps of serious substance.

But the issue isn’t even whether or not developers gamble with their time and investment, it’s that Apple keeps changing the rules.

The Pulse application was summarily dropped from the App store (coincidentally on the very same day Steve Jobs demonstrated it to the world) when the New York Times bizarrely complained that an RSS reader was reading its RSS feed.

Hundreds of developers found their applications summarily dumped from the App store this spring when Apple changed it’s mind on whether or not it liked breasts. Thousands of other developers found their incomes interrupted when Apple changed its terms of service to disallow the use of application generators to create iPhone apps.

R.I.P., Macintosh

The future, for Apple, is all about iPhones and iPads, and, more important, the operating system software that powers them—the sexy new iOS 4, which these days seems to be getting most of Steve’s attention.

(Click to take a look at the “insanely great” career of Steve Jobs._

As Steve himself told a developer via e-mail recently:

We are focusing primarily (though not exclusively) on iPhone OS this year. Maybe next year we will focus primarily on the Mac. Just the normal cycle of things. No hidden meaning here.

Little hint: when Steve says there’s “no hidden meaning,” what he means is, “Duh, loser, isn’t it obvious?”

F-Secure Antivirus Research Weblog

via XSS.

How small mistakes can create big problems.

wp-security Scan is a must-use plugin for anybody looking to secure their website. It’ll tell you all the basic WP security settings you do or don’t have enabled.

….

I would also change your ‘admin’ username. Then hackers have to try and guess your username AND password.

Also use the ‘Login Lockdown’ and “Secure WordPress” plugin.

Login LockDown adds some extra security to WordPress by restricting the rate at which failed logins can be re-attempted.

Secure WordPress automatically changes a few things inside WordPress to make it a little bit more secure.

….

It’s better to strip down the permissions to “admin” and make yourself a new account with full permissions. Then even if hackers manage to get into “admin” account they can do nothing :) They wasted their time.

….

I’ve also found that the most secure thing you can possibly do is also very simple. After your site is set up simply change your theme file permissions to 444. They can be read, but they can not be changed (ie- hacked by an automated bot).

The ONLY downside is that when you want to modify your theme you need to change the permissions back to 666 temporarily. This is a small price to pay not to get hacked.

via HOW TO: Secure Your WordPress Blog.

Some good advice on security for WordPress from the comments.

I discovered today, much to my delight, that in Google Reader, when I’m reading a news feed of a blog I like, that when I click “Feed settings”, then “More like this” and voila, you get a list of similar news feeds.

It’s a great way to discover new sites! Very cool.

(It’s also interesting to see which feeds are on the recommended list from multiple source feeds).