Category Archives: Technology

Workflow/Distraction — Wikipedia and youTube

A friend sent me a link to a lovely article in the NY Times — apparently a regular feature called Bookends — asking two writers questions about books or their work. This week, some delightful writing from Francine Prose and Rivka Galchen about how internet tools like Google have changed the way that they work.

But YouTube is something else. Like any sensible person, I fear it. Whole mornings have vanished down the rabbit hole as I’ve skipped from link to link. But I also adore YouTube, and I need it…

Read the whole article here.

How Facebook Uses Your Friends to Gather & Sell Your Data

When John Doe sign up for a service using Facebook, the company that provides that service has paid Facebook not only for the right to affiliate with Facebook but also for access to John Doe’s information, including his birthday, political views, URLs John has visited, his recent purchases, favourite things and so on. This data can be used, for example, to raise the prices for items they are sure John Doe will buy, and lower them for things John Doe might not buy.

Not only are they offered all this information about the John Doe who signed with them, but if the company has paid for “enterprise” or “pro” data access, they are also offered all of YOUR information, if you are in John Doe’s contact list.

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Read about it in Cory Doctorow’s piece in BoingBoing.

Remember, when you delete things or say you don’t want your facebook friends to see them, Facebook itself does not delete them, nor promise not to sell / share them. Your so-called privacy settings affect what you share with your contacts, not what Facebook can share with its partners and ‘trusted associates.’ There are no huge office buildings with people reading all of John’s data, of course, it’s all harvested and sorted into categories using complex software routines… the same sort of software routines that allow a website like Google to search the entire world wide web and find the things you’re looking for in seconds.

If you use Facebook and an Android phone, you should also read these articles about the new ‘permissions’ Facebook requires you to approve, such as reading (and storing for analysis of you and your contacts) any SMS text messages that come in or out of your phone, the ability to prevent your phone from ‘sleeping’, the ability to turn on wifi even if you’ve turned it off, turn your phone’s sound on if you have it set to silent, turn on the phone’s camera or microphone without telling you, send e-mail from your phone without telling you, open your address book and delete your friends’ personal e-mail addresses replacing them with their Facebook e-mail addresses, and so on.

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J. Angelo Racoma, “Is Facebook Messenger Spying on us?” on The Droid Guy,
Daniel Brecht, “Facebook’s Android App Heightens SMS Privacy Concerns” on TextMessagingResource,
Tony Calileo on his blog.

Tip: time to start texting friends you know are Facebook addicts with texts like: “I’ve been looking at digital cameras, but I think unless the prices go down about 20%, what I’ve got will do me for another year or two.”

Technologies that Didn’t Change Education

pushButtonsNice article by Matt Novak at Paleofuture about technological advances through the years that were predicted to be educational game-changers. And kinda weren’t.

15 Technologies that Were Supposed to Change Education Forever

Americans — Write to your Representatives!

Ben Collins writes for Esquire magazine:

“A federal appeals court ruled that the FCC can no longer enforce which websites Verizon and all other broadband providers can favor, limit access to, or outright block — even if it’s to prop up a service or website of their own.”

This could lead to the end of the internet as we know it.

Michael Hiltzik writing for the LA Times:

“The only course is for public pressure to overcome industry pressure. That’s a tough road, but there’s no alternative. Do you want your Internet to look like your cable TV service, where you have no control over what comes into your house or what you pay for it? Then stay silent. If not, start writing letters and emails to your elected representatives and the FCC now. It’s the only hope to save the free, open Internet.”

Advert to Invert Introverts

carrotMomentOk, I know I’m biased in favour of Apple and emotionally vulnerable to this sort of stuff, but Apple’s new TV commercial, called “Misunderstood,” turned me inside out and literally brought tears to my eyes.

It starts with chords reminiscent of Eric Satie that morph into a slow thoughtful carol, other than that there are no words and no brash loud sales pitch.

It is especially designed, I think, to be emotionally devastating to a certain kind of introvert, one who appreciates big time but participates minimalistically, and to whom approval and acceptance and making others smile mean everything. Without the title (unstated in the ad itself), without the carrot moment (see? he IS participating, anticipating and living in the moment), and without the look on his mom’s face (and see how he’s looking for her reaction?), it’s a nice enough commercial. With those things, I think I’ll probably well up every time I see it.

Except for his talent, that boy is me.

Now here’s the crunch: What it’s saying to people like me is that an iPhone gives you the tools you need to win the approval you crave while allowing you to be you and not pretend to be an extrovert. Is that emotional manipulation? For me, it happens to be true: technology, and particularly Apple technology, has allowed me to be who I am better. Are they just jerking my strings? Or are they saying “We get it. We get you. Here. Here’s something you can use to connect. You.”?

Gmail Graphics Change

This week, Google made a change to how it treats images in e-mails you receive.
On the surface, it makes reading e-mail more convenient. We used to have blank spaces in some messages; we had to click to see the image. Now Google says they’re better at screening security threats so they’ll just show the graphics.

The change is really about the data — data that leaks out when you view some images.
If what has been e-mailed to you is not an image but a link to an image, then before you can view it, your computer sends a request to see it to whatever server the image is stored on. Some companies, like MailChimp, put links to invisible one-pixel graphics into e-mail solely for tracking purposes. And by virtue of your having requested an image, the sender can tell that you’re reading it, when you’re reading it, and from what IP address, which usually allows them to know, roughly, from what location you’re viewing it. Even knowing that the e-mail address is a ‘live’ one with someone who reads the messages, is info that can be sold. By not showing the image, but making it clickable, Google used to allow us to decide whether to let the information leak or whether to stay ‘invisible’ to the sender.

Google is shielding us from marketers and information gatherers.
But Google’s change is not opening up all these leaks (as some have reported), instead Google is stepping in between us and the marketers. They request the images from the sender when the e-mails arrive in their system. And then they store all those images on their own machines. So when you or I view the image, we’re no longer requesting from the sender, we’re requesting the image from Google themselves. The marketers will not get the information about who I am and when I view, they’ll just see that Google viewed the image.

Except this strengthens Google’s own hand in the info-sales game.
Now of course Google doesn’t need to gather the leaked information from these graphics — gmail users leak data all the time from our constant requests to use their services. Google could sell information about us to others. This change doesn’t give them more information, but it does give other companies less. Marketers used to be able to gather information for free by sending e-mail and watching for requests; now the only way they can get this information is from Google.

You can change back to the old setting, but there doesn’t seem any real point.
There is a toggle in your Account Settings to go back to having to click to see these images, but there is no real point. You won’t shield any more data from marketers by doing so, and it will have no effect at all about what Google can see.

Online Ed Founder Sounds Retreat

Sebastian Thrun, founder of Udacity, one of the big three online education institutions admitted publicly that his company’s “massive open online courses” are a “lousy product.” He was in part responding to yet another study that showed massive drop-out rates, this one a pilot study at San Jose State in the USA. See the article at SLATE and a similar one at the Chronicle of Higher Education.

Meanwhile, EdX, another of the big three, may have a plan for attracting and keeping students: replace qualified academics with celebrities — also reported by SLATE.

 

Something that Facebook Helps Make Better!

Teacher Andrew Simmons writes in the Atlantic that while social media probably reinforces poor writing mechanics and rhetorical skills, it does help in one — much more important — way: social media, especially Facebook, is teaching young males that it is good to communicate feelings.

He is of the opinion that this improves young people’s essay writing. I’m not so sure that this is the case. But it will be very interesting to see what effect it has on shifting stereotypical gender roles.

The article is well worth reading.

How a Sewing Machine Works

I’d never been able to figure it out. I decided it must just be magic. Then the Atlantic published this .gif

just_in_case_you_ever_wonder_how_a_sewing_machine_works-98670

How the iPad Succeeded Where Other Tablets Failed

jobsFred Vogelstein writing for Wired, adapted from his new book:

It wasn’t the iPad’s looks that had everyone rapt. Many wondered if they were watching the world’s greatest entrepreneur make a huge mistake. The tablet computer was the most discredited category of consumer electronics in the world. Entrepreneurs had been trying to build tablet computers since before the invention of the PC. They had tried so many times that the conventional wisdom was that it couldn’t be done.

Read the Wired article. See the book.