Time to Give the Telephone Back to the Cellphone?

By | November 22, 2011
11 Comments

Was interviewing a guy intimately involved in the mobile phone industry the other day, and we were comparing the various features of our sophisticated smartphones, when he suddenly leaned over and said, “Off the record, but this is my favorite phone.” And he showed me this:


Nokia 1100, photo Mobile Phones UK

The Nokia 1100, according to Wikipedia, is the world’s best selling handset, having shifted 200 million units. It seems to cost about $20, often less, and has a battery life of about 400 hours. And, crucially for my friend, sports two important features: It makes and receives calls and SMS. Beyond that, in the words of Bryan Ferry, there’s nothing. (Well, actually there’s WAP, but who uses that?)

The point about the Nokia 1100 is that it’s a phone. It doesn’t pretend to be anything else (except a flashlight, if you press and hold the “c” key down (presumably “c” stands for torCh or flasChlight or “come into the light where I can see you, Mildred”.) It’s designed for conditions in developing countries — dustproof keyboard, non-slip sides — but for many of us that could describe an ordinary day in the office (dusty, slippery, in need of illumination).

“For email,” he said, “I use this,” waving a Nokia BlackBerry clone. “For phoning and SMS, I use my 1100.”

Clearly my interviewee friend is not alone. A glance at Mobile Phones UK’s page on the model, the phone has a sizeable fanclub, with comments from Romania, Pakistan, Iran, the Philippines, Argentina, UK, Zaire and Tanzania. (Typical comment: “I needed a simple, sharp looking, long life phone. I got it. I love it!”) Of course, there are some who aren’t happy, but with 200 million units out there, that’s not surprising.

I guess my worry is, and has been for a while: As phones get more sophisticated, when do they stop being phones? And if it takes you longer to make or receive a call (or an SMS) than it used to, at what point do we need to split the phone/SMS functionality from our smartphone and give it back to the likes of the 1100?

Sleazy Linkers Lose An Ally

By | November 22, 2011
9 Comments

Seems as if there’s a bit of a groundswell building against internal links, which I got all upset about a few months ago. (internal linking is where you place a link on a word like, say, Google, but instead of actually linking to Google you link to another page on your own blog about Google.) Amit from Digital Inspiration points out that

Valleywag, the Silicon Valley gossip blog that everyone hates but still reads, always practiced excessive internal linking but good sense prevailed at Gawker and they have suddenly changed that habit.

Amit also points to Shane at the Daily Telegraph, who is complaining about the same practice. Etre.com points out how brazen TechCrunch are at doing it, but points out that Mashable and Engadget continue to do so.

I find it personally annoying because I tend to drag links into PersonalBrain or elsewhere and expect a link that says ‘Flock’ to go to Flock. But it’s also dishonest, like putting an EXIT sign over a door in a shop which instead goes into another part of the shop. It’s against the principles of the net, and, frankly, tells me that something is wrong in the state of Web 2.0 if this kind of thing is considered acceptable or even good practice.

What to do? Maybe a name-and-shame list until these recalcitrants start respecting the intelligence of their readers?

A Lesson from Valleywag – Good Linking Etiquettes | India Inc.

Blogged with Flock

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The Puppy Love Scam

By | November 22, 2011
1 Comment

The scam emails offer a Yorkshire Terrier dog for adoption

A few weeks back I wrote about love scams (“You Give Love a Bad Name,” WSJ.com) — how scammers are trawling online dating sites looking for suckers. What interested me about the scam is that in some cases the scammers play a very patient game — luring the mark in over a period of months before any sting is attempted. 

Sophos, the antivirus people, say they have found a new twist on the same scam, where scammers are apparently luring folk by offering a puppy up for adoption:

The emails, which come from a husband and wife who claim to be on a Christian Mission in Africa say that their Yorkshire Terrier dog is not coping well in the hot weather.

Says Graham Cluley, senior technology consultant for Sophos:

“The criminals are offering the pet puppy in an attempt to gather information from kind-hearted people who jump in to help. If you respond the scammers will try and steal confidential information about you, or sting you for cash. If you fall for a trick like this you’ll be the one ending up in the doghouse.”

Actually this is not quite new and not completely accurate. The LA Times wrote back in May about how the scam works:

People who responded to the ads eventually were asked to send hundreds of dollars to cover expenses such as shipping, customs, taxes and inoculations on an ever-escalating scale.

Some reported paying fees totaling more $1,500.

A piece in the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette last week said the scam had been going across America for a year and points out that a Google search for “Nigerian Puppy Scam” turns up more than 200,000 “hits.” (I must confess I found only 16,000.) Bulldogs and Yorkshire Terriers are favorites. The paper was apparently alerted to the scam when ads were found to be running in its own paper. A month earlier the Toronto Star reported that a local woman had parted with $500 for a 11-week old terrier, after responding to an ad on a free local classified site and complying with requests for three payments to ship the dog from Nigeria. (A reporter called up the scammer, who uttered the immortal scammer’s words:

“Are you trying to call me a scam? I’m a family man,” he said. “I am a man of God. I am a missionary.”

For more detail on scams and how to spot them, check out this page on the IPATA website.

Dogs work because we love them, and are suckers for the sob story. What’s interesting here — and why these scams are in some ways more dangerous — is that the scam does not play upon people’s greed at all, but instead upon their charity and sense of decency.

Two conclusions from this:

  • These scams are aimed at throwing a wider, and slightly different, net to the old scams. The victims are going to be people who are moral, not greedy.
  • Chances are the scammers are aiming at making less money from these scams, but perhaps make up for it in volume. Perhaps the days are over when scammer aimed to make five-figure sums.

Puppy offered for adoption by Nigerian email scammers

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Facebook’s Faceless Apps

By | November 22, 2011
16 Comments

image

We’re probably being too kind to Facebook, and, in particular, to the third party applications that plug into it. They’re abusing user trust and committing sins we castigate others for, so we should be consistent: Many Facebook applications are spam.

Take this one, for example, illustrated above. It’s called ATTACK! and upon accepting an invitation from someone the screenshot above (reduced for privacy reasons) is the first page you see. You’re encouraged to invite friends:

image

To make it easier for you, the first 10 friends on your alphabetical list have already been selected (what it must be like to be called something like Adam), and the only button available is the big blue one that says:

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There are, as far as I can see, no alternative buttons. No options to just skip the inviting part, or to unselect the existing friends, meaning you’ve got to unselect the ten manually. If you do that and then click the blue button you get another message:

image

And the ten are selected again. Hang on a minute; wasn’t I invited by someone else to play this game? (Laying aside, for a moment, why I would be playing a game during work hours of dubious intellectual or work-related relevance.) Why can’t I just accept his invitation and start playing?

By now I’ve forgotten who invited me and the invitation has disappeared. So has my enthusiasm for playing the game. Or having anything to do with Facebook applications.

To be fair, quite a few friends seem to love these things. What troubles me is that if these applications are so cavalier with well-established norms of non-spamming etiquette, how cavalier are they with our personal data? Remember every third party application requires the user to select this box:

image

without ever going into detail about which information. All my information? Just a bit of information? Facebook has a lot of my information — not as much information as it used to, because I deleted a lot of it in a moment of panic (beware if you remove the fact that you’re married from your personal information, as you’ll get messages from people as they see in their status feed a broken heart icon and the words “Jeremy Wagstaff is no longer married” broadcast to all your friends. It is, however, a good way to find out what people really think of your marriage.)

So who is behind ATTACK!? Who are we giving that information to? Well, it seems to belong to a company called Presidio Media LLC. I say “seems” because there is no link to a company web page; the copyright sign includes that company’s name, which also seems to be responsible for games of Poker, Blackjack and Lotto. The company website, however, is empty, and I can’t find any registration information. There are three email addresses on the Facebook page, suggesting from their email addresses that they’re behind tribe.net, a social networking site.

Given Facebook has enjoyed huge popularity with what I would call social networking virgins — those who have not previously explored this online wonderworld of sharing information — I am, like some party pooper, troubled by the implications, even as we all frolic in this newfound social whirl.

But it’s probably just me. Anyway, whoever invited me to play ATTACK!: sorry. Let’s do it offline in the pub.

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Software That Plays Tag

By | November 22, 2011
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This week’s WSJ.com column (subscription only, I’m afraid) is about Jiglu, a sort of automatic tagging service you can see in action somewhere on this blog:

If you’re a writer, you hope your words will be etched in stone for eternity. If you’re a blogger, you’re happy if someone stumbles on your writings a few days after you posted them. Blogs, partly because they often consist mainly of commentary on things that have just happened, and partly because of the way they are structured (most recent postings first, making it easy to ignore everything you wrote before), are a transient medium. Rarely is a blog post treated as permanent. We write, then we forget.

The problem, I conclude, is that amidst all the writing, and despite the power of tagging

Blog posts, left to themselves, tend to have a short shelf life.

Briton Nigel Cannings thinks he has the solution to this: automatic tagging. He sees value in all those old blog posts of mine (he may be the only one) and reckons all that old content out there is a repository of wisdom that just needs to be sorted out better. Tagging it ourselves, he thinks, just isn’t enough because we don’t always see what we’ve written in a broader context. “Manual tagging is the first step” to sorting and storing blogs and other online content better, he says, “but it still relies upon people understanding themselves, whatever they’ve already written about, and how their content fits in with other people’s content.”

More at Loose Wire – WSJ.com.

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