Category Archives: Technology

The technical camel’s nose

November 14, 2013 jkkblog 2 Comments

What is malware? My definition: anything you install on a computer that does things to that system that you don’t want and can’t opt out of beforehand. The more wrong it does, the worse the malware. Some companies have terrible histories of malware, such as Adobe, RealNetworks and Apple. The arrogance goes: ‘If you want our product, you must surely want to let us do everything we wish. How could you not Just Trust Us? We’re so wonderful; our products are so unimaginably superior that your mortal mind can’t possibly find a reason not to give us free rein.’

Because, companies, whenever I let your camels’ noses under my tent, I have extra work ahead in order to clean up after the camel.

Apple Itunes is malware. In this case, it caused a piece of hardware to stop working.

Not long ago, my old Hell Inspiron’s power supply died. Not unexpected, but inconvenient to be sure. A glance at the motherboard showed swollen capacitors, which I am advised is a sign of a hosed or soon-hosed board. It was slow anyway (like any XP PC seven years old), so this wasn’t all bad. I had backups and peripherals, just needed a new machine. Of course, I dealt with computer vendor rudeness and failure to listen carefully to me, and as a result the recovery took far longer than it should have, but I’m tech enough to battle through most of that. Perhaps the most enjoyable aspect was buying it from anyone but Hell. Their business model broke years ago when their support became an evasive illusion. I have no idea what Michael Dell could possibly have been thinking to let his brainchild go so far astray.

So, most of the way into recovery, the time arrived to install Itunes and get my music library set up once more. I’m always wary of installing anything from Apple, and especially upgrading it to a new version, because Apple has a department full of evil little elves who work long hours thinking up new ways to make software more irritating for no additional benefit. If you want to have guaranteed headaches, just install some Apple software on your PC and make sure you let it automatically update itself as often as it wishes. The software will do the rest.

What I learned: Itunes can cause your system to forget that it has a DVD player/burner. Evidently Itunes has some facility for playing, burning and otherwise interacting with these devices. Fine, but making it disappear for all other purposes? The short-term fix involves editing the Windows Registry, which is never done casually or with slack attention to detail. Some research has told us that Apple has known about this issue for years, several full-digit versions back into history. And still does not correct it. Why should it? Apple paid those elves good money to come up with such a diabolical ‘feature.’ It’s been a problem since Vista. And by the way, the next time you run Itunes, it breaks the DVD functionality again. You can choose to use your DVD player, or to have Itunes, but not both.

No, I did not pay for Itunes. However, I do own an Ipod, for which I paid, and its instructions did advise me that I could and should use Itunes with it. Thus, I did so at Apple’s instigation after paying for a product. It is very reasonable to expect that this product not behave as malware, at least in a reasonable world.

Apple evidently doesn’t live in that reasonable world. And that’s why you, good reader, should approach any Apple software for the Windows OS as a form of malware. If the Apple camel’s nose appears at the base of your tent, my advice is to hit it hard enough to make it go away.

Human relations, Social comment, Technology

Why computer store techs are rude

November 5, 2013 jkkblog 6 Comments

It’s not your imagination. In the main, except for the Apple world, they really are rude. They don’t listen well. They bombard you with technical lingo that you will not understand. They don’t do it the way you asked them. And if you ask too many questions, they get increasingly testy.

Ever wonder why it’s that way? Why can’t computer stores hire competent technical people who also have people skills?

I used to sell computers. I sold PCs about five miles from the Microsoft main campus, many years ago when a 386 machine was hot stuff. I was a combatant in the trenches of the IBM/Microsoft wars. Back then, your local independent computer store had sales people and technicians, and where possible, we kept most of the techs away from the customers. It was better that way. Nowadays, however, more likely everyone in the store is a tech on some level, so you could end up dealing with anyone.

The first major thing to absorb about the computer support world is the pace of change. Imagine trying to be an electrical engineer, or an attorney or a doctor, and your knowledge set has to turn over every three years. Only the basic methodology and accumulated ‘gut feeling’ problemsolving skills remain with one; the rest becomes unimportant in three years and obsolete in about six. Not that many people can keep pace with that level of change, and most of them are socially dysfunctional because a lot of them have some personality syndrome that enables them to focus on fixing or puzzling out something for hours.

So you aren’t always dealing with highly adjusted social butterflies, and it’s uncommon to find a great tech who is also a people person. Computer store owners are small businesspeople, who pay people for a reason. The Aspie who cuts you off short and gives curt, opaque answers to reasonable questions is probably a reliable worker who generates income for the company and doesn’t steal the inventory, and the owner reasons that odds are against getting a better replacement. Plus, the owner is probably of the same personality type, and doesn’t see a great deal of value in worrying about people’s feelings. If they get it to work, or their policy protects them against having to do something, far as they’re concerned, case closed.

What is evident to me: the longer people work in the business of making computers work, the more jaded they tend to become about the public. They’ve heard all the lamentations before, and they deal with a lot of ignorance from the public. Much of the public doesn’t even see a difference between a software problem (usually created by the user, foolishly installing a wide variety of garbage and rarely bothering to invest in virus protection or backup) and a hardware issue (which is fixed, by and large, by swapping stuff out until the problem goes away); it just thinks, “So why don’t you just FIX it?” If it were that simple, they would. It often is not. However, good customer service requires one to take each customer at face value and offer a bit of education.

The service people don’t do that, because their general perception of the public is that it is too clueless to understand what they say (when in reality the problem is the service person’s poor communication skills). Why bother if people won’t understand? goes the reasoning. Another reason, more understandable, is that often it boils down to having to tell the user that s/he is an idiot. “But I LIKE my WeatherBug!” whined so many of my clients, when I told them that this noxious piece of spyware needed to go. “I never use the shutdown button,” smirked so many clients. “I just flip the switch on the surge.” Their expressions said: I’m so cute, such a rebel. No, you’re a fool, and you probably caused your own problem. “But my machine came with McCAFFee! I can’t have a virus!” Yet they never subscribed to virus definition updates, and even McAfee is better than nothing. All those discussion paths lead to the point where one must refrain from telling the paying customer that he or she did something stupid. There are only so many tactful ways to say that, and tact is not many techs’ strong suit.

What is more, most of the public won’t take advice. Shut down your machine using the shutdown mechanism in the operating system (Windows, for many). Keep a virus scanner up to date. Don’t just let everything install itself, and uninstall stuff you just don’t need. Defrag the thing now and then. Figure out a means of backing up anything you care about. One tells them all of the above, and as a staff colleague back in the dorms once said about getting residents interested in activities, “Their lips say ‘yes, yes’ but their eyes say ‘FOAD, FOAD, FOAD.'” The techs tried, and tried and tried, to convince people of the value of these forms of maintenance. After the five hundredth person listened politely, smirked a silent ‘in your dreams I’ll bother with that crap,’ and kept right on doing it the wrong way, they got tired of bothering.

So that’s what we’re up against. Socially awkward, often personality-dysfunctional people whose good advice was mostly blown off, who don’t have much respect for the public (partly deserved by said public), and who just hope to get out of the conversation as fast as possible. They are happiest when benching the machine without anyone saying, “My Internet Windows won’t download my Works documents off my hard drive, and Explorer doesn’t get my mail, and my machine is slow even though I’ve only had it for six years, and I can’t program my data off my CD. Can you just fix it?”

That’s no excuse for not listening well, and it’s no excuse for being rude. If you suck at dealing with the public, the boss should make sure you never have to. But if the boss also sucks at it, he doesn’t even realize that’s a problem.

And there you go.

Investing, Privacy, Social comment, Technology

Why credit card fraudsters get to keep trying until they score

July 30, 2013 jkkblog Leave a comment

I have just experienced one of the bizarrest, stupidest situations I could imagine.

Yesterday, we got a phone call about our Bank of America Visa card. It was from their Fraud Department. Like anyone with more brain cells than his shoe size, I hung up and called the number on the card. Yep, the real deal: someone at a branch of a specified bank (let’s call it Union Bank) had tried to jack a four-figure cash advance from our card, something we’d only do in the gravest emergency. Props to the fraud trigger system. Fair is fair: they agreed to Fedex new cards to Deb and I, in separate states no less. At this point in the story, naturally, I’m delighted with their handling.

After I let Deb know, she suggested I find out where the transaction originated, and what would be done to prosecute it. I hadn’t thought about that, but she was dead right. Where it originated might give us a clue as to where/how the information was stolen. And if it had happened at a Union Bank branch, well, that was investigative gold. Banks video everything, from ATM stuff to standing in line trying not to get caught scratching one’s privates. If I knew where this bank branch was, I could contact the relevant law enforcement, assist them with any evidence I could provide, and maybe we’d snag the crooks doing this. Great idea, dear; I will do it.

I had no idea what I was in for.

I called the BOA Fraud Department again. The first time, I got someone with such a heavy accent it was problematic to communicate. I asked politely to speak to someone easier to understand and was sent to Silenceland; they hate that, but I’m not going to piddle around trying to decipher an extremely heavy accent. I called back, got someone a little more conversant in American English, and was put through to the next level. After they validated that I was the real me, it went something like this:

“Hi. Yesterday there was a fraudulent cash advance attempt on my account. You closed it and are sending me new cards, which I appreciate. The attempt came from a Union Bank. Could you tell me which branch, so I can notify the police?”

“We don’t have that information, sir. Since the transaction was refused, we did not save it.”

“What? Did you provide it to the police, so they can actually catch the goon?”

“No, sir. Since no fraud occurred, we did not.”

“How am I supposed to notify the correct police department if you throw away the evidence of the origin of the crime?”

“There wasn’t a crime, sir, only an attempt which was defeated.”

“Attempted crimes are also a crime. How will you ever stop the sources of crime if you don’t report them to the police?”

“That isn’t the same, sir.”

“Oh, yes, it is the same. If you swung a baseball bat at me, that’d be attempted assault, and the police would consider it an offense. One is not allowed to attempt felonies.”

“It’s our policy, sir. When the transaction is refused, we do not preserve the information. Only our law enforcement department could get it, and you have to be a police officer to contact them.”

“I assume I am not allowed to talk to your law enforcement department?”

“Correct.”

“So let me get this straight. The information is available to your law enforcement department. I can’t talk to them. And since I have no idea whose police have jurisdiction, and your company won’t tell me even though it could, it is impossible for me to initiate an investigation. And you do not see the Catch-22 in this, evidently.”

“That’s our policy, sir.”

“Your bank is the best thing that ever happened to thieves. No wonder so few of them are ever caught. You simply don’t care. Okay, I have all the information I need. Thank you for your hel–”

“Sir, we do care, we just don’t reta–”

“Ma’am, I am trying to get off the phone while I can still be polite. I realize you personally didn’t set this ridiculous policy. Far and away the wisest thing you can do right now is to let me end this call.”

“Knock yourself out, sir, have a nice day.”

===

I don’t fault her for repeating back a stupid policy, nor for being a bit of a wiseass at the end–I was getting pretty frustrated, although it’s not like I was abusive or anything. My issue, as should be clear, is with Bank of America’s Fraud Perpetuation department (as I now choose to call them). Here we are with a recorded environment as the evident point of origin of the felony attempt. The amount was the sort of amount that looks like it was chosen on purpose, to slip below a certain threshold of detection and notification. There’s a chance this was done by a professional criminal who gets information from garbage cans or is an insider at a business.

And you cannot get Bank of America to help the police chase them down, nor will Bank of America give you the information you need in order to do it yourself, unless you are a police officer. And, obviously, since BoA will not tell you the location of the crime attempt, you cannot know which police to notify. How many branches does Union Bank have? Hundreds, probably, in many states. Good luck.

Thus, credit card crooks keep on crookin’, thanks to the benign neglect of Bank of America’s Fraud Perpetuation department. And they evidently know it. Evidently there’s little risk at all. This system practically invites fraud.

I’m so glad we are firing these people as our checking bank. The only reason we keep this card is for the Alaska Air miles, for Deb to take trips now and then to visit family. And I’m not sure it wouldn’t be better just to buy the plane tickets ourselves.

Social comment, Technology

A service to the technologically unaware

June 7, 2013 jkkblog 6 Comments

It’s pretty common for me to see someone on Facebook, or wherever, complaining that this or that suddenly stopped working. Or reverted back to an older setting or version, or doesn’t work as advertised at all, even though they looked it up in the help. It’s pretty frustrating for them, because they don’t see how that could be. “It’s supposed to work! What idiot designed this?” Some of the reactions seem to personalize it, as if someone is deliberately messing with them; others are just woe-is-me of some sort.

I’m patient with it unless/until they try to get me to ‘fix it’ for them, or more or less demand that I (who used to work with computers, thus I must know All Things Technical) take personal responsibility for it. That tripped your BS meter, unless you have ever worked at supporting computer users. They usually want someone to bitch at for their frustration, and the helper/tech will do. Somehow, it’s the helper’s fault that someone else created a flawed thing. This is why a lot of people who could perhaps help you, choose not to. They’ve been through that too many times. Those who have not yet learned, or for whom the validation of successful problem-solving is too alluring to resist, keep volunteering assistance.

The words I hated most, and that immediately marked a user as not grasping the situation, were “I don’t see why you don’t just FIX it.” If that were feasible, lady, and if it were that easy, I would. Your great-nephew would–he’d just overwrite everything you have, break everything you want to use by doing an easy reinstall, and then vanish when it came time to help you get your “e-mail working with your printer, and your software downloading in your drive, and your Works chart colors back the way you want them again.” Or whatever other way in which you imagined that solving computer problems was exactly the same as car repair. (That quoted list of complaints was a fairly typical sample. Most people don’t know what the tech terms actually mean, so they misuse them to try and sound more technical, which makes them in fact sound pretty dumb. Kind of like the non-Spanish speaker who responds to Spanish by saying ‘El grande pantaloons’ or ‘buenos nachos.’)

So I’m going to present some generalized realities that a lot of people don’t grasp. Words of ultimate futility: “But it shouldn’t be this way!” Many things should be and are not, or should not be and are. I don’t care how it should be, because I don’t deal in ‘should.’ I deal in ‘will’ and ‘won’t,’ and ‘can’ or ‘can’t.’ I can, however, tell you how it is. You’d be less annoyed if you knew. Or you might be more annoyed–but at least you’d be less mystified. It isn’t always just you. Sometimes, the situation is just unpleasant. It might help to know, at the very least, that it’s not always your fault.

1) Any large, complex piece of software, be it Facebook, your new Massive Ultracarnage III game, or MS Word, always has major imperfections. There are ways in which the documentation is simply wrong. There are features that are broken from day one. The help file cannot possibly keep up with the reality; no one’s willing to pay that many tech writers.

2) Most major ‘upgrades’ are net backward movements, adding some features but mostly moving the same stuff around so you have to look for it all again. It’s not your imagination. You’re not crazy. That’s reality.

3) Most major changes are a series of additional pieces bolted on, rather than rethinking the whole base concept. Thus, most highly mature software is like a passenger car that was evolved from a tricycle, and deep down inside it, still has that tricycle, which is no longer needed functionally, but it’s too much headache to remove, plus removing it would break everything else, thus the whole thing would have to be rethought and re-engineered as a car from the start. They won’t do that very often.

4) If software is online, such as a website, and is very popular, its information and code are stored across large amounts of computers and storage, with some redundancy and ability to share the load if one of them has a problem. This means that your reality will not always be the reality of everyone else. “It’s working fine for me, sorry.” That’s usually temporary, as they are gradually fixing something, upgrading something, or propagating some change about the system.

5) Sometimes, when something on a website is messed up, or an ‘upgrade’ turns out to be broken, or data is trashed, the easy fix is to revert to a fallback copy known to be good. This means that changes in the meantime were lost. It might be many or might be few, depending on how many people used that and how long it took to realize that the new Doodad had a memory leak that threatened some dire consequence.

6) Information systems management is a lot like generaling a battle. You make some hard decisions on the fly based on the best information you have at the time, and you try to avoid heavy casualties, but stuff happens. Expecting everything to go right most of the time flies in the face of this reality. It’s rather a miracle any of it goes right, ever, for any sort of bearable price.

7) All changes are beta-tested on live users. You are the guinea pig. “Why don’t they test it beforehand?” They do, but what they consider beta-testing is not comprehensive because no one can think of ways to creatively break software like several million people. They don’t have several million in-house testers and can’t get them. The only real way to find what’s truly messed up is to give it to the public and let said public work its magic by diversity of use.

In theory, beta-testing should mean ironing out the major kinks before inflicting change on users. In reality, users are the beta testers. They hand you the car and let you do with it what you want. Some people will drive normally. Some will drag race. Some will repeatedly slam on the brakes to see how long it takes for them to fail. Some will set up ramps and attempt stunt jumps. Some will refuse to drive it over 10 mph. Some will wrap it around the first tree they see. Some will put it on a grease rack and start altering it. What is sure: if there is a flaw, someone will turn it up, either by accident or by using the car in a way it was never intended. Software works like this.

A few years back, I remember, there was a WWII operational game that inventoried each unit down to number of operational vehicles and weapons. Amazingly detailed, and players could create their own scenarios to simulate nearly any battle. There was an enormous argument when someone set up a company of trucks and pitted it against a unit consisting of one Tiger tank (which, in reality, could have taken out twelve trucks without even firing its main gun; just run them over or machinegun them). The trucks always won. You can’t imagine the bitchfight that followed, with people screaming how unrealistic the game was. Never mind that the objective of the game was to simulate divisions and corps moving against each other; this microexample ‘proved’ the game was not realistic. Here’s what’s unrealistic: any competent officer or sergeant–hell, a private–attacking a heavy tank with a bunch of trucks in the first place. The developer (Norm Koger, an exceptionally capable fellow) used the term ‘pathologically strange scenarios,’ and he was right. But the point: someone was going to try that, and claim it to be a Major Issue.

8) In information systems management, sometimes so much goes wrong at once that–like medical staff after a catastrophe–the technical people must prioritize. It’s not that your issue doesn’t deserve fixing. It’s that there may well be five more major issues that you don’t know about, that affect hundreds of thousands of users, whereas yours only seems to affect a few thousand. They will triage the eternal process by number of users impacted, severity, and so on. This means there are numerous small problems that will simply never be fixed because they will never be important enough. Repair and testing resources are finite. If you have one of the small problems, you may just be screwed. Since there is always someone with at least a broken leg or a severed artery, your nagging hamstring pull may not get any attention; you may just have to work around it as best you can. Sucks when that happens.

9) Why are nearly all upgrades actually downgrades, or unimportant lateral movement at the very best, as described in 2)? Because you, the user, really aren’t the priority. You never have been. You are dealing with the programmer mentality, which prefers to create the new rather than fix the old. The programmer mentality is abysmal at designing user interfaces–which are the way users interact with the system–because the programmer doesn’t care that much how many steps the path requires, simply that the path eventually leads there. Watch the way a Facebook game devolves and you’ll have an example. It will keep bolting on more and more stuff, in this case to generate revenue, and because programmers like to keep creating the new, but hate going back to rebuild the old. What if most users like it the way it is and don’t want any changes (they haven’t even adjusted fully to the last batch)? Not the programmers’ problem, because the users aren’t what drives the thinking. They can never come out and say that, of course; it’s a shibboleth.

If programmers went back and made everything work correctly, really did it right, they’d get bored. They don’t like doing that. Programming involves more artistry and creativity than most people imagine; creators gotta create. Perhaps more importantly, if they didn’t keep coming up with new stuff they imagined would improve the system, there’d be less need for programmers, with all problems fixed and nothing new planned. Programmers like to have jobs too, even if their job is in fact to make your experience worse. It’s their mortgage payment vs. your happiness; the former wins.

10) Ideal software on a large scale is problematic to create, even starting fresh. In theory, developers would come up with a concept, build it, test it, find all the major flaws, release it, learn about a few that slipped through the cracks, fix those and be done, and move on to re-imagining the next major version. It’s never like that. That takes a long time, and with nothing new being released, there is less new revenue. At some point, everyone who wants it has bought it or pirated it. What happens is that developers wing it a lot faster, and let the world find the flaws, which take longer to fix–and which delay starting on something new.

11) Thousands and millions of users all have computers that differ as much as one human from another. A few humans can’t stand cilantro, for example; it tastes like soap to them. The rest of us can’t taste the soapy stuff, and we keep dunking our chips in the salsa. There is probably someone mortally allergic to kumquats, will go into convulsions if they even touch one. Some people are allergic to everything. We vary.

Even if the hardware were all the same, a different mix of software is loaded on each, and most software does something to the operating system when installed. This means it is inevitable that some user will have some deadly combination of hardware and software, duplicated in only a few cases, that happens to mess with the one piece a given system must have. There is no practical way to troubleshoot or fix that, unless it’s widespread enough to trace to a single item (usually a specific piece of hardware, like a video card, or perhaps even a specific version of that hardware’s accompanying software drivers). Why do the tech people always ask you for a full list of what hardware you have? This is why.

For example: I bought one of the Diablo games. Everyone else loved the new game and said it was brilliant. It hard locked my machine after a few minutes. If this were very widespread, everyone else wouldn’t have loved the game. It probably had to do with some video or sound driver, which I could have upgraded and hoped for the best. Or I could just decide it wasn’t that important, which is what happened. Same with one of the SimCity games: about ten minutes in, just as it was getting interesting, it crashed. Not for most people, who thought it was the best version ever. When you’re in that situation, if you’re in a small minority, don’t count on a solution. It rarely comes.

12) A fresh restart solves a lot of problems, often enough to always do it. Clear the cache, power cycle the modem, reboot the machine, then immediately try what isn’t working and see if it fails again. This is why techs always have you do this: it solves enough problems that it’s nearly always worth a shot. No failure is diagnostic unless it can be reliably repeated from a fresh start, because some failures are a result of an extended, deteriorating operating system session which something else caused to begin deteriorating.

If you can start fresh twice and get the same failure, reliably, you can reproduce it. If you really want it fixed, being able to reproduce it on command gives the propellerheads something to work with–because there is, then, a way to know when it is addressed. Magic words to tech support: “I can reproduce the failure every time from a complete fresh start.” They can sink their teeth into that.

So, you have problems. You always will, here and there. Using a computer is like driving down a highway that has some frost heaves and potholes. Some you will miss, either because you never drove that stretch of road, or because of your alertness. Some you’ll hit. Some will flat a tire or crack an axle. The people who make the software are mainly concerned that most people eventually get there, even if they have to take detours. This may mean that some roads just keep deteriorating, because they are less traveled, and because it was more important to fix a major bridge that was about to fall into a river.

You can still be annoyed about this if it helps you, but the annoyance isn’t going to change reality. But maybe if you at least understand why it’s this way, you’ll be able to guess whether the problem is worth trying to report or troubleshoot, or whether you’re better off just living with it, working around it, or rethinking how important it is to you. Expecting perfect computing is like expecting a perfect round of golf every time, something not even tour pros achieve. Their success is mainly judged by how few major mistakes they make, and that is also true of computing–for developers as much as users.

Homeownership, Social comment, Technology

A Craigslist salesbabble and rantbabble glossary

May 8, 2013 jkkblog Leave a comment

With the large amount of commerce and commentary that emanate from CL of late, some trends of vocabulary have arisen to accompany it. Some already existed, but some are morphing or being invented. Language is dangerous on the propaganda principle, in that when the word is repeated often enough, the human mind inclines to take it more at face value. Glance at a Red Robin menu sometime, for example, and count the uses of ‘zesty,’ ‘hearty’ and ‘tangy.’ None of those really mean anything, except that they’re trying to convince you the food is good. Yet the overall impression you take from the reading is one of energy and strong flavor, simply because of the words they repeated.

Therefore, someone has to step up and translate the CL salesbabble and rantbabble. This is the work of writers, who are supposed to contribute some of their understanding for the common good. Just plug in the real meaning for the term, and read the ad that way, and you are good to go.

!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! or ***** or any other sprayed punctuation: “Mostly hype, move on”

Action figure: “Toy I outgrew.”

Affordable: “Desperate.”

ANYTHING IN ALL CAPS: “Uninteresting; this is my way of trying to get your attention”

As is: “Pretty sure it’s got problems.”

Athletic: “I walked last week from my car to the grocery store. And parked far away!”

BBW: “Really fat.”

Bizop: “Scam.”

Build your brand: “Marketing is all on you.”

Collectible: “No one collects this.”

Cute: “Someone’s wife once liked it.”

Detail ‘orientated’: “Can spell, unlike me.”

Distinctive: “In atrocious taste.”

Flexible hours: “At our beck and call.”

Forever home: “Hoping the crockpot won’t come into play.”

Franklin Mint: “Worthless.”

Full service: “I don’t return phone calls.”

Gorgeous: “Meh.”

‘Grammer natzi’s’: “Literate individuals.”

Great find: “Wasn’t such a great find for me, so I want it gone.”

Great view: “You can see some buildings and a farm.”

Highly collectible: “No one ever did collect this.”

Homebody: “Don’t really like doing anything.”

HP: “Highly Prone…to problems.”

HWP: “Somewhat fat.”

Inkjet: “Money sink.”

Landscaping: “You must pester me if you plan to get me to do actual work and accept your money.”

Limited edition: “Didn’t sell to begin with. Except to me.”

Make offer: “I know it’s worth very little. I hope someone will offer me too much.”

Management trainee: “Powerless toady abused by customers and manager alike.”

McAfee: “I bought a real virus scanner, so I want to dump this useless one on some sucker.”

MLM: “Much Lucre for Me.”

Must see: “Bores most people.”

Needs repair: “In ruins.”

No frame: “Wasn’t even worth framing.”

Nonprofit: “Pay sucks.”

Or best offer: “I’m desperate. Lowball me. I’ll guilt you, then I’ll take it.”

People-oriented: “Must deal well with assholes.”

Price is firm: “I know it’s not worth what I’m asking.”

Rare: “I have no idea how rare it is.”

Runs good: “Has other problems you will discover later.”

Rustic: “Plain.”

Section 8: “Get your concealed weapons permit first.”

Seafood processor: “Trawler slave.”

Shabby chic: “Old junk.”

Socially conscious: “Cheap.”

Spacious: “Will hold all your crap.”

Timeshare: “I can’t believe I fell for that.”

Vintage: “At least twenty years old (for electronics, five years).”

Works great: “Will probably work long enough for you not to sue me in small claims.”

Worth at least twice that: “Worth half that, if even that much.”

‘Your a moran/looser’: “I lack all sense of comic irony.”

Privacy, Social comment, Technology

How the Google data hydra begins to die

April 23, 2013 jkkblog Leave a comment

I think I watched a head of the Google data hydra wither and die today–the second one in two weeks. It’s hard to predict the future, but this may have meant something for someone besides me.

What it is

Let’s define what this ‘data hydra’ is all about, and why I call it that. Here’s what Google does. It provides a very useful free service or software product to the public. The idea is to entrench that service to the point where it becomes a need, not a want. Here’s the catch: each of these services will phone home to Google on what you did, helping them to assemble a multi-faceted portrait of you for marketing purposes. Google can then sell advertising targeted at you. Some of it is camouflaged as stuff other than advertising.

You may not resent this. If you do, it doesn’t bother me; the choice is very individual. But if you do not resent it at all, the rest of this post may be of marginal interest. You may consider that it’s a voluntary business transaction in which we use the service in return for fair compensation of surrendering some data for their use. If so, you probably don’t think this whole subject is worth discussing. Okay.

The data hydra has tentacles. These fasten into your system and begin to report back. The best known are cookies, little data bits that can report back to Google from many non-Google sites. I don’t know what all they report, but I know that they want to remain on your machine between sessions. Less known are web trackers, little beacons that also may be on many non-Google sites. Thousands of web advertising companies use them, and most of you have no idea they are there. However, if you wonder how Facebook knows you just went to a site pertaining to travel to Bali, that’s how. Google, of course, uses them as ubiquitously as possible. A tentacle that presents Google with the richest harvest is actual applications and helpers that you download. If the thing is on the web, there are at least ways for you to refuse to let it work on your machine. If it’s on your machine, it can do whatever it wants, phone home any time it cares to. The most common would be Google Chrome (web browser; what’s better positioned to listen at your e-keyhole?) and Google Earth (surface view software). I’ve always loved it when people claimed that Google Chrome gave them better privacy. If anyone honestly believes that a Google application running on his or her computer will not make 100% sure that it has a backdoor saying ‘Google is the exception; Google gets everything’, that’s fine. You’re in the position of Native Americans signing treaties, pretty much, but have fun.

Everyone has to decide where his or her front line is, if there is to be one, in the battle with the data hydra. Or just do what most people do: say “screw it, who cares.”

My battle fronts

If you don’t use anything by Google, you still don’t shut out the data hydra, though Google would have to go further to profit from knowing what you read. I block all Google things that I can on as many sites as I can, selectively enabling some when it’s easier than fighting. Thus, everything from Google presents a decision: will I use it, and what will I tolerate in order to use it?

Google Chrome: will not use. I assume that if I use that, all other privacy efforts are defeated.

Google Earth: tried, uninstalled. Novelty application, but clunky and just isn’t very necessary.

Google Accounts: a key feature of all Google tracking. In their ideal world, you would always be logged into your Google account. Thus, as often as possible, they deny you features unless you login to a Google Account, in which case you are offered a richer experience. I have one, but I don’t use it very often.

Google Search: have long used, blocking all the cookies. Also have several browser add-ins to lie to it about my location, spam it with spurious searches, and otherwise feed it mountains of baloney. Still useful to me, though they are gradually making it worse, and driving me toward others.

Google Documents: probably the smartest trick Google ever pulled, with the potential to make Microsoft irrelevant. Offers cloud computing: ‘here, let us store your data; it will never get lost, and you or anyone you permit can access it anywhere.’ Of course, the big draw here is to make you login to a Google Account. Sometimes, they demand this just to view the document. In most cases, they demand it if you want to modify it. I fear this one the most, because due to my line of work, it’s possible I could be forced into doing Google’s bidding in order to get paid. Employers don’t care about your data hydra concerns–they do what’s easy for them, and if you don’t like it, find another job.

Google Groups: Google decided to simply swallow Usenet whole. Google Groups allow a fairly clunky form of collaboration and discussion, which can be as private as you wish. They were the cause of me creating a Google Account, because my RPG group was run by someone who embraced Google whatever and I wanted to be able to communicate and participate. However, I always hated this in silence, and I’ll admit that (years later) when they waited until I missed a session, turned it into a behind-the-back bitchfest about me, and kicked me out by phone call without the slightest phase of ‘here is what bothers us, we will face you honestly and give you opportunity to change your style,’ one of my consolations was that I never had to use the Google Group again. Easily dispensed with, unless your esoteric interest happens to exist in a Google Group.

Google Translate: will translate to and from some thirty languages, with passable accuracy. I have used it mostly as a dictionary. Bing has one that seems just as good. Recently, Google has been periodically breaking some of its features for people who block as many tentacles as I do. Today, I deleted GT from my toolbar. I wanted to do something, Google was refusing to load GT, and I decided I’d had enough.

Google News: aggregates world and local news, very handy for avoiding mainstream media’s ‘here is the story we order you to care about today’ manipulation. How do they decide what’s local to you? They look at your IP and figure out where you are. GN was the first of my Google uses to begin periodically breaking itself unless I gave it what it wanted. Happily, news aggregators are everywhere. I deleted the toolbar button several days ago, tired of dealing with ‘will it work for me today, or not?’. I don’t like its replacement’s layout as well, but it always works for me, and it gets my current location wrong enough that I can bear it.

Gmail: will not use. Obviously.

Google Toolbar: will not use, same reasons as Chrome. I’d rather comprise my own toolbar.

Google Maps: not needed. Alternatives are just as good.

Google Books: useful now and then in research, long as I can limit what they get.

Google everything else: not relevant to my world.

When you think about it, deciding to resist Google is a formidable task. Look at all that stuff. I don’t even want to use Google Anything ever again if I can help it, and they have even me caving in on some of it. By now, surely, you understand where they get all this information. Most of us give it to them because it’s easier than resisting. Basically, Google is like the annoying guy who has some redeeming features, who keeps subtly pressuring the woman for sex. The woman finally decides to get it over with, since he’s not that gross and she sort of likes him in some ways, and gives in. Google: analogous to the grey area between actual date rape and authentic consensuality.

What happened, then

Last week, I decided that if Google wanted to make News a crapshoot for me, I just didn’t need their version. Today, the same thing happened with Translate. Two data hydra heads, rendered meaningless for me, battle over. And it makes me wonder, because Google is sort of like a giant mudflow with enough weight behind it to seep into just about anything that isn’t solid, watertight and strong. It will continue to push: to offer new services, but exact a privacy toll for their use. When someone decides they just don’t need that particular Google service, Google loses a product. You are the product. You generate evidence of preferences, thus you create Google’s merchandise. Less use of anything from Google is what Google rightly fears. Thus, the day someone just stops using a piece of Google, a data hydra head is vanquished.

Google should pay us

So should Facebook. The default assumption, never questioned by most of us, is that Facebook and Google services represent fair trades for our marketing data. There are a lot of ways to look at this. “That was the deal, and you took it, so don’t renege. By refusing them all possible information, you’re stealing from them.” I guess if you see the world that way, most of my blog posts probably don’t interest you. My own way is simple: while Google and Facebook do the above, and probably specify their rights to do the above deep in the bowels of legalese-laced Terms of Service, they have never frankly disclosed all the data they mine, how they mine it, and how much money each of us makes them. They just kinda sorta did it the backdoor way. That’s not forthright business, so I reserve the right to be less than forthright myself. Telling the truth to deceptive people is a fool’s game; we are entitled to deceive the deceptive.

If they offered us real money for our data, telling us up front what they’d collect, that’d be different in my eyes. They won’t, naturally, because they don’t need to. We’ll give it away to them as the barter toll on the information highway, and since it doesn’t come out of our pockets, it doesn’t register.

What you do is your call. My goal is to use as little Google as I can get away with. If they want my data without resistance, they can make me an offer. Until then, I fence with the heads and tentacles of the data hydra, and for the most part, I think I win.

Privacy, Technology

My current privacy array

October 31, 2012 jkkblog Leave a comment

I’m fairly sure I’m at the right asymptote of ‘willingness to go through headaches and try new things in order to thwart people’s data gathering just because.’ The tools for this are in a state of constant change, so this might be a time for an update.

My basic browser is Firefox 16.0.2, not because I want to be on that version, but because I was forced by sunsetting to upgrade from a previous version. FF has heavy memory leaks, and has become clunky, but a) it has the most add-ins, b) I hated Safari, c) there is no way I’m going to let Chrome have its way with me, and d) these days, if you use Internet Explorer to do anything but download a real browser, your friends will stage an intervention. “Jonathan, we’ve all come here because we care about you. Your use of IE has affected my life negatively in the following ways…” For all FF’s flaws, it has the most dynamic privacy tool authoring community, and that’s what matters most to me.

It begins with Adblock Plus, which hides just about all the advertising, everywhere. There is a certain irony in all the efforts I exert in order to ruin Facebook’s data mining, when I don’t in fact see their consequent advertising. ABP is low maintenance. It has the added benefit of allowing me spot removal of any image I happen to find offensive and just don’t need to see again.

NoScript is a very helpful package that doesn’t let JavaScripts run unless I say so. It probably also accounts for most of the headaches and tweaks I go through, because it goes by site, and some pages have scripts from fourteen different sources (some of which you only learn of after unblocking this other one). Which one is the one needed in order to do what I came to the page to do? At times I have to turn it off temporarily, but I usually just enable scripts one at a time for the session.

FlashBlock is easier than NoScript because it shows a ‘play’ button on the screen where the Flash content is. Usually it’s a video. Do videos automatically play when you go to a page? Not for me, they don’t, and that’s how I want it.

TACO is wonderful, because it does the best job on cookies. For example, I can accept Facebook cookies on Facebook and on the one game that I play, while blocking them everywhere else. I have to do that one page at a time, but once you do it for the pages you visit most, it’s less necessary every day. That also lets me blow away Google’s ubiquitous cookie-mongering. There is no reason either of those sites needs to set a cookie on my browser just because I visited, say, CNN. That visit, and what I did there, is neither Google’s nor Facebook’s business. While TACO also blocks most web trackers, it doesn’t do it as well as…

Ghostery. In addition to cookies, many sites use beacons/web trackers to keep tabs on what you do. Ghostery blocks nearly all of them by default. If it finds one unblocked, you can choose to add it to the list. Very easy to use, and very satisfying.

GoogleSharing partly convinces Google that I’m somewhere else. Currently, Google News thinks I’m in Austin, TX. Once in a while, I believe when GS resets to a new ‘location,’ my GN shows up in a foreign edition and I have to change it. Although if it’s a language I understand, sometimes I’ll do a bit of reading first. GS says that it anonymizes my search results in some way; sounds good to me.

TrackMeNot spams Google with spurious searches on mundane things. The effect of this is to bury my actual Google searches in a sea of irrelevant crap. Slight downside is that sometimes it gets a little zealous, and Google makes me do Captcha in order to search, announcing that it has detected a lot of traffic from my IP address. This is rare.

WebOfTrust assigns reliability/safety icons to links, especially in Google searches. This mainly keeps one from blundering into sites that attempt to emplace spyware or viruses on your machine. Foolproof it’s not; helpful it is. Part of the problem is that the color of the icon could mean anything from ‘naughty pictures’ to ‘unsafe due to spyware,’ and you have to hover the mouse in order to find out. Part of the problem is that the safety rating of a page comes mainly from user input, so it’s possible that a given page was given adverse ratings simply because a bunch of people wanted to hurt the page’s owner. Use it with some discernment, and it’s helpful.

What are the downsides?

The biggest one is the need to selectively enable JavaScripts until a page works. I admit that sometimes I just punt and use another, unshielded browser. Since I don’t go from place to place with other browsers much, the dossier they compile from them is a tiny fraction of my web surfing. It’s also pretty much impossible to know which script unlocked what I wanted, unless I do it one at a time, which is often more futzing that I desire.

Second biggest is needing to go into TACO each time I go to a new page and block/delete all its cookies. You’d be amazed how many sites stick you with Firefox or Google cookies; WordPress and Yahoo are also frequent offenders.

Third would be the inability to save Google search settings because I won’t take Google cookies on their search page. At times, the non-evil folks at Google break Google search for people who do this–I’m convinced it’s to teach us a lesson.

Fourth would be that you have to use Firefox, which isn’t a very efficient or robust browser compared to others. For games, I use Sleipnir, Opera and/or Maxthon. Sleipnir and Maxthon are very robust. Opera is lousy, but it’s good to have some backup without resorting to IE. Maxthon’s update nags are very annoying; haven’t found out how to get them out of the system tray. At least I can ignore Opera and FF’s update nags.

Anyway, if you want to try browsing my way, there are all the links. Enjoy.

Human relations, Technology

Memories of my days as a computer shaman

October 19, 2012 jkkblog Leave a comment

Back before I became a ~~hired pen~~ literary professional, I used to be a computer shaman. My business was moderately successful, and it was good social therapy. I got to thinking about this after watching a video on Cracked, which I suggest you take a gander at as well:

Five Reasons the Guy Fixing Your Computer Hates You

Mostly I didn’t hate my clients. I liked most of them. I liked helping elderly ladies on Social Security get connected so that they could see pictures of their grandbabies, research their osteoporosis and keep in touch with their friend Adna in Wisconsin. I liked being able to reach into the middle of their mess and get rid of the thing they’d installed (very unwisely) that was causing their Windows installation to throw up. Most of them were polite and courteous to me. It was evident that most of them were philosophically pretty different from me, in terms of socio-political-spiritual outlook, and none of them seemed to care.

I went to houses of guys I was pretty sure were retired underworld figures. I went to sheds in east Pasco where huge dogs threw themselves to the ends of heavy chains in forlorn hope of attacking me. I went to mansions. I went to two-bedroom apartments containing three families. I went to farms and I went to garages. I went to the homes of old mercenaries (the real kind), old doctors, and old just about everyone. In the end, the business was a casualty of the $500 PC. It just no longer made sense for anyone to pay me $50/hr to fix a problem that if it took much time, it was easier to upgrade their abacus to something modern.

Here’s the stuff I didn’t like…

Directions.

Everyone adores giving directions, but I couldn’t tell people that I was using map software and would just print myself a map. The minute I asked for the street address, everyone launched into lengthy, arcane directions, full of information I did not need and landmarks that did not matter. I learned to just shut up and let the storm blow past. One way I knew I was about done in the business was when I became candid about it. After five minutes of meaningless directions, someone would ask (because I hadn’t responded), “Are you writing all this down?” I’d answer, “no, because none of it will help me find you. I have your address, the color of the house, whether the numbers are on it, and a printed map. But everyone loves giving directions and there’s nothing I can do to stop them, so I’m not interrupting you. But no, sir, I’m not actually absorbing any of it, to be honest.”

Dogs.

Now, I’m not a fan of dogs. All I want is for them not to come near me. That means they will not put salivas on me, leap on me, startle me by bumping my leg under the desk, or anything else that increases my tension. Chief use of my briefcase? As a shield when dogs would charge at me. And almost without fail, the syrupy, whiny explanation: “Oh, he just wants to loooooooove you!” Maybe he does, ma’am, but I already have a lover. How I wish you’d just control your animal. Of course, most clients with dogs could not process the concept of someone who could not do his best work with a dog in his face. And it’s the dog’s house, so it’s not like I have any standing to object. I just had to endure.

Great-nephews.

Oh, how often I saw it. I’d come in to a PC with a relatively fresh Windows installation. Mrs. Miller: “Well, my hard drive wasn’t downloading to my e-mail, and I couldn’t get my disk working, and my Windows web browser wouldn’t connect to my Microsoft Works, and my printer wouldn’t print the blue ink anymore. Now, I am a total computer dufus. My great-nephew is a computer god, he works at Hanford, he programs Excel, he knows everything about computers. He told me I needed to just wipe everything off, reformat and start again, so he did some stuff. Now I can’t find my e-mail at all and the Internet is broken. All my book chapters are gone and there is no Works at all. How much do you charge to put it back the way it was?” I was thinking: ma’am, if your great-nephew were here I’d take out the VGA card and cram it into his posterior. Why do these little hotshots do this, and then not help Auntie preserve or reinstall her data? It was hopeless and I could do little to change it.

Political types.

I provided services to two quite prominent local politicians, plus some other folks many people had heard of. Some were great. One political activist was about the biggest jerk I ever did service for. First time at his door: “So, are you a [party name]?” I looked at him with calm, suppressed indignation. “Sir, right now I’m a businessperson, and my priority is to resolve your printer problem.” On another visit, he started the “I’m not sure if you know who I am…”, clearly jonesing for free services–assumption being that I owed him for his political activism. I always believed that business was business and politics was politics, and that I should not introduce mine and they should not introduce theirs. Some simply couldn’t refrain, sitting next to me, dropping hints designed to suss out my political perspective.

The perception that a generalist could easily fix all things.

Hardware, software, connectivity. To them it was all ‘the computer.’ “Can you just fix it or not?” Some people would not grasp that, in order to see on a single visit if their problem was a flaky stick of RAM, I’d have to either carry every kind of RAM with me at all times, or run and get it and swap it in, then wait a few days to see if the problem repeated. How many hours of time was all that? Was I not to charge for that fetchin’ and gettin’? Was I to cart around a van full of stuff (constantly changing with the times) just waiting for this or that to be someone’s problem? If it were that simple, and that easy, sir, I would “just fix it.”

M-CAFee.

Not McAfee, as in MAC a fee, but mc CAFF ee. So many times. “I think I have a virus, my friend says I sent her one, but I don’t see how. This came with McCAFFee.” Did she ever note that it was a three-month trial version? No. Did she ever pay them to keep the virus definitions current at least, even if it was the worst virus protection software out there? She had no idea she needed to. “But I should be safe. I do a full scan every Sunday night!” You scan your computer with an obsolete virus detector. And you don’t understand why something newer than that just sent itself to everyone in your Outhouse Express e-mail directory. It was horrible. All could have been solved with a free one online.

People unwilling to learn.

I was a generous computer shaman, with my time and energy. Most people were doing some very stupid things that caused most of their problems. And when I’d tell them what the problem was, they’d smile that stupid little smile that says, Oh, you’re so cute, with your ideas of good computer use. Do you really think, young man, that I am going to abandon my habit of shutting off my computer by shutting off my surge protector? Well, the answer was frankly no, I didn’t think they would. But I had to try to at least tell them the problems it caused. They never learned. “But I like my WeatherBug!” It was spyware. They didn’t care.

Some of it, I admit, kept me in business. I told myself over and over: Shut up, idiot, and be glad they don’t do it right. That means they have to pay you. Fair enough. But not all the situations were solvable, and if things don’t go right, people tend to think the computer shaman didn’t do a good job. In other words, if they can still break their Internet connection, that must be my fault because I didn’t make it strong enough.

In the end, the frustration became too much, and I was making more money writing and editing. So I just focused on that.

Editing/writing life, Technology

Container of bubbles

August 23, 2011 jkkblog Leave a comment

This feels very weird. I’m writing on a netbook from a hotspot in a Starbucks in Renton (that’s south of Seattle). It is noisy in here, and 80% of those present here have their faces buried in computers. This isn’t a coffee shop; it just looks like one.

It feels so Seattle. It’s even cloudy outside, with rain threatening. Air’s humid, though it’s not cooking hot. And not a single person in this Internet terminal that happens to serve coffee would voluntarily have a conversation with any other person, unless they met here on purpose.

This is what I do not like about cities. I understand wanting to have one’s bubble of not dealing with random people; I really do. But if you look at this situation right now, this place of ass-numbing hardwood chairs and crappy music, it is all just a container of bubbles. There is another human being three feet from me on the right, and if I tried to have a conversation with him, I would absolutely shatter all the social rules. I would be marked as fundamentally odd, probably dangerous, and quite irritating.

Technology may be connecting us with people far away, but it is isolating us from people who are close enough they could grab each other’s junk without leaning.

The Editorial Maverick