iPhones are locked for a reason

Why are iPhones locked? Joshua Gans knows why they shouldn’t be.

So why are they locked? What’s the real story?

AT&T is really a branch of the US National Security Agency. Gay people are generally more trendy than straights, and thus more likely to use an iPhone. The government there wants all iPhone calls to go through its systems, so that it can monitor and oppress communications by minority groups. It’s all about the Republican agenda.

You just wait until the Latino Phone comes out. It, too, will be locked to a military industrial complex-controlled corporation. It’s all about the Republican agenda.

Google Trends – Europeans spell it “minigames”

Today you’ll learn how to use Google Trends, if you didn’t already. Not that this is a lesson, but you will anyway, because you want to try Google Trends for yourself.

My personal experience: I found a video on the ‘30 Day Challenge’ website about using Google Trends for researching blog topics. The video is here.

So, I typed in “minigames“, and was surprised to find that most searches came from Germany! How strange, thought I. But then I looked up “mini games“, thinking it would be the same search.

But no, apparently while a search for “mini games” will include “mini-games”, a search for “minigames” is an entirely different thing to Google.

The Oxford’s divine instruction is that hyphenation does not matter, except where it is necessary to distinguish recover from re-cover, to avoid “anti-Darwinian” looking like video gamer’s nickname.

However, this interesting separation of searches gives rise to some important insights, as seen over the fold.

An inflexible IT security policy might only force open bigger vulnerabilities

IT policies will, inevitably, involve restricting or “blocking” various Internet services from employees. However, it is imperative that these policies have built-in flexibility. Furthermore, IT and business staff need to have open, frank communication about circumstances where an exception to the policy is simply necessary.

 

 

The alternative is that business staff will bend the rules anyway, and attempt to side-step your organisation’s security mechanisms.

 

 

Even quickly skimming the article ‘Ten Things Your IT Department Won’t Tell You’ (http://online.wsj.com/article/SB118539543272477927.html?mod=fpa_mostpop), you can easily predict that at least some of your employees are engaging in conduct such as smuggling software onto corporate computer systems, exposing sensitive information to the public Internet, deleting valuable audit trails, and generally risking the integrity of your organisation’s data.

 

 

Luckily, the answer is easy: flexible IT policies. Strict, inflexible policies make staff staff feel they must take matters into their own hands and circumvent your organisation’s online protection. Flexible policies focused on the real objectives of security and data integrity will help you lead your staff to engage in conversation with your IT department, and maintain best-practice electronic security.

 

 

I’d rather spend a relatively short time re-working our IT policies, than have to explain to our key stakeholders why their confidential information was leaked through an unofficial channel created by a frustrated employee.

Blackle, the best mini-site

Blackle is the greatest mini-site I have ever seen.

It’s so very mini, and requires absolutely zero maintenance, yet due to the brilliant idea behind it, people are going to come back to it again and again for years to come. They’ll set it as their home page, and run their every web search through it.

Not only that, but now and in the long-term future, a large proportion of visitors will spread the link to all their friends, family members and colleagues. In five years’ time, some poor sod will find Blackle, say to themselves “Oh cool”, and promptly email everybody they know. Talk about viral marketing.

Wheaty responsibility comes with weighty powers

Where is the strongest concentration of executive power in the Australian government? Is it in the police, with the wide-ranging power to enter private premises and seize evidence? No, they are required to apply for a warrant from a member of the judiciary, thus diluting the concentration of power.

Is it in the Prime Minister and Cabinet, who may declare war and mobilise the military? No, they are too accountable to Parliament and to the people. They could never get anything done before it was vetoed.

Is it the Commissioner of Taxation, with the unprecedented ability to at his whim prohibit a person from travelling, and whose staff may wander through your records looking for anything “of interest”? No, 100 years of case law has walled up his powers into limited circumstances.

In reality, there is only one truly powerful bastion of executive power in this country. From June 30, the almighty Wheat Export Authority will have the discretionary power to enter a person or corporation’s premises and take information, on suspicion of that person…

possessing information relating to wheat.

Wheat.

When it comes to what is truly important to this nation, we do not mess around. Don’t play with our wheat market, or you’re dancing with fire.

Reference: Herald Sun Thursday 14 June 2007.

Key words include Export Wheat Commission, Australian Wheat Board (AWB) and silly laws.

Email: how to sort my inbox

I’ve recently wrestled with the problem of ballooning inboxes full of unnecessary emails. So here’s the treatment plan I’ve come up with:

1. Mail arrives in my inbox on the mail server.
2. Mail is transferred to my system inbox.
3. It stays there until it’s done with. Get Things Done!
4. Messages then go one of several ways:

• Receipts, invoices and other evidence goes in a folder called ‘Records’.
• Anything sentimental, like warm and fuzzy conversations, love letters and really good jokes, goes in a folder called ‘Sentimental’. I could probably do away with these messages by transferring them to my diary. But then I’d need a diary…
• I’ve also created a special folder called ‘Account Information’. This is for those emails from web sites saying “welcome to Such-and-such, your account name is Bob and your passwords is sadfjghafd”. I find these very handy, in case I forget passwords.

I ask you then: Well, what’s your system?

Tax business travel to reduce emissions

Today Joshua Gans discusses emissions from airlines, and how adding a $30 levy to all tickets is hardly reasonable. He does mention the idea of a more focused levy, to discourage certain categories of air travel.

I agree with the idea of taxing some of the more unnecessary business travel. I can understand the need to attend some meetings and conferences in person, but some organisations have just gone nuts. Interstate plane tickets around Australia are fairly inexpensive these days, plus the fact that 30% of the ticket’s price comes back as a tax deduction anyway.

But how could we identify the relevant flights, and thus fairly tax them? Perhaps the answer is to remove or reduce tax deductions where the activity is environmentally unfriendly. Are there other activities where this approach would be in the public interest?

A blanket $30 price hike would affect tourism, while a $30 reduction in the tax deduction for air travel would only affect business travel.

I can see the public interest in encouraging tourism within Australia, but where is the public benefit in flying business people around the country every five seconds for a meeting?

Perhaps they’re all flying to climate change conferences?

The evolution of reading the paper with breakfast

Back in the day, I’d read the newspaper with breakfast. Now I tend to read the news on the Internet, and that includes the ‘blogosphere’. The trouble with the silly blogosphere is that I get distracted, write an essay-like post, and now I’m late for work!

Also, see http://www.bradlands.com/weblog/1999-09.shtml#September%2010,%201999, and wonder if my blog would also turn into a prince if you kissed it…

Superfast broadband for the what now?

I wrote such a long comment at CoreEcon that I figured I should replicate it here:

I had a look at X Media Lab, and I saw games and digital video. I can see that being beneficial for education. But I can’t see that needing 100Mbps.

For example, Fire Department 3, is a computer game, but also simulates a very real scenario. This approach could help in future to train people for all kinds of jobs, where they must respond to scenarios that are not easy to stage in real life. A further advantage is in letting people who are geographically distant from each other, experience teamwork and get to know each other. However, there is no indication that it needs more than a 512kbps Internet connection to play in online teams.

As far as practical examples go, I have yet to hear someone say, “I am trying to create digital video as a home-based entrepreneur/artist/developer/etc, but my Internet is too slow.” Perhaps I’m just not looking hard enough.

But I have noticed that, out and about in the suburbs where I live, the only thing people want Internet above 512kbps for is downloading TV shows.

The progression of Internet technologies has taken us from 300bps to 1mbps and beyond. In the days of 300bps dial-up, Internet speeds were a serious deterrent to trying to transmit anything more than a few words in real-time. There was a desire to be able to transmit pages of text in a matter of seconds. With today’s Internet, we have achieved the wishes of the 1980’s. This blog took a split-second to load on my computer.

Our current uses of the Internet are still largely based on text and relatively narrow data streams, such as Internet games. The application of the Internet to video has largely been in replacing and improving the broadcast television model.

If we look at broadcast television, yes, it is amazingly useful for education. Specialist educational programs, news, current affairs and documentaries have far more benefits than simply entertainment. But all these applications can be, and are, delivered under 512kbps. For example, Google News, blogs, the New Matilda website, and Wikipedia. Youtube has benefited me personally by demonstrating processes that are best expressed in video, and are harder to learn about via text. All under 512kbps.

David does make an excellent point that we really have no way of predicting what the world will throw at us in 2007, 2012, and beyond. My contention is that, based on previous experience, we may not need this.

I will use the analogy of a book store I once worked at: the manager installed high-speed “gigabit” (1,000Mbps) networking in-store, in order to future-proof for as-yet unknown applications. This investment was made several years ago, but those cables still serve nothing more than glorified cash registers. Perhaps we should leave the huge infrastructure investments until we have some idea of what the actual purpose of that investment is?

Setting out some practical examples where ‘decent broadband’ is necessary would really help my understanding of this issue.

As for using virtual reality simulations to manage pain in children, there is a lot of anecdotal evidence to support this idea. Many parents know that all we have to do is plonk little Timmy in front of the telly, and he’ll stop complaining pretty quickly.

Virgin Money and Qantas, customer service excellence

I’m in a very good mood today. Do you know why?

Basically, over the last couple of days I’ve blown away my credit limit, and that got me into a slight jam, since an important air flight booking with Qantas had its payment rejected. But when I rang Qantas, they were kind enough to give me another 24 hours to arrange payment! The lady on the phone was informative and I couldn’t have asked for anything more.

At Virgin Money, another helpful telephone operator explained all the rules for me, and told me about what to expect in terms of processing time when shifting funds around and using BPAY.  Fantastic customer service!

They didn’t even have me on hold for very long. I had to talk to the Commonwealth Bank branch staff too, they were alright, but nothing special. The Commonwealth Bank’s telephone banking robot is pretty poor too. Nothing like ING Direct’s intuitive, efficient menu system. Plus ING’s robot voice is a lot more pleasant to listen to. Alright, I’ll admit it, as much as we all love a chirpy call centre chick, I’m a sucker for that ING man’s confident, non-threatening and helpful tone.