BlogShares – Fantasy Blog Share Market: “BlogShares is a fantasy stock market for weblogs. Players get to invest a fictional $500, and blogs are valued by inbound links. “
Column: AlphaSmarts
Loose Wire — Frustrated Writers, Take Note: This Palm-powered, plain-vanilla, word-producing machine has none of the bells and whistles of other computers and won’t break your back or the bank — meaning more time for haiku
I used to write a lot better before I got a computer. Really. The lethal combination of pen and paper ensured that I could write anywhere, anytime. Then, in 1986, I bought an Amstrad word processor and it’s been downhill ever since.
Nowadays I can’t focus on one program for more than five minutes, what with all the distractions: software notifying me of incoming e-mail, software notifying me that my incoming e-mail-to-spam ratio is 96.23%, software notifying me my last e-mail to Auntie Mildred has been read 12 hours and 46 minutes after it was sent, a chat message from an insomniac Australian friend, an alarm alerting me I need to pay rent, my firewall alerting me of yet another assault on my Internet defences. No wonder I never write haiku any more.
Computers are designed to do lots of things, and with graphical interfaces like Microsoft Windows and the Mac, they’re designed to do them at the same time, jostling for room on your screen. That’s great if you’ve got tunnel vision, or are crashing up against deadline [like me right now]. Otherwise, all this extra processing power isn’t matched by any great multitasking ability in our brains. My message this week, therefore, is this: If you’re planning to write seriously, don’t use a computer. Use a Dana.
OK, for e-mails and memos to your vocabulary-challenged boss, you may not need monastic calm and a minimum of distractions. But computers, even notebooks, may not be your friend if you’re trying to compose something masterful and meaningful. Instead, you may want to check out AlphaSmart, a U.S.-based company, which realized early on that there was a market for something to write on without all the extra hullabaloo to distract you. The decade-old AlphaSmart series, now into its third generation with the 3000, has been popular with students, teachers and anyone else needing a decent keyboard and a usable screen that don’t break their back or the bank. They’re robust too: One reader describes on the company Web site [www.alphasmart.com] how her unit — stuck to the floor, and slightly melted — was the only electronic gadget still working after her house burned down.
The 3000 is about the size of a notebook, but looks more like a keyboard with a small LCD display on the top. Powered by three AA batteries, it delivers you to whatever you were writing before you turned it off [or had to flee the licking flames]. The four-line display is simple but shows just enough of what you’re doing without feeling cramped. The keyboard is full sized and there’s a USB socket for uploading files to your computer, and a socket to connect to a printer [or external keyboard, if you wish]. Grey keys line the top of the keyboard, allowing you to store and recall up to eight separate files. It’s the sort of thing a student would love, which is the market AlphaSmart has focused on, but it could just as easily work for you if you’re sick of sitting at a computer all day, or tired of firing up a laptop on a flight and watching the power die just as the Muse kicks in.
Late last year AlphaSmart took the concept one stage further with the Dana. The Dana does everything the 3000 does, only better. The screen is bigger at 10 lines to the 3000’s four, the keyboard’s nicer and the whole thing is a tad sleeker than its forbears. It also runs the Palm operating system, which brings with it plenty of advantages: For one thing, if you’re familiar with Palm, you’ll know your way around; for another, you can do everything a Palm device can do, such as swap Office documents with your computer, store contacts, calendars and whatnot. In fact, to some it could be just a bigger Palm device — most of the software is redesigned to fit a screen far wider than your hand-held — with a first-class keyboard attached. But that’s missing the point: The Dana is a word processor that uses the best Palm has to offer — compact, useful software, immediate access, configurable fonts, low power consumption — without trying to be too much else.
If you’re looking for something to write on during a trip to the country, the dentist or the restroom, and can’t be bothered to bring a laptop [or can’t afford one] then the Dana is an option. If you’re a writer and sick of the distractions of modern computing, the Dana is worth a look.
Gripes? A few. The monochrome screen is nice but looks a bit dated, especially the backlight. With a list price of $400 it’s substantially cheaper than a laptop or notebook, but not that much cheaper than a state of the art, full-colour hand-held device. [Shell out another $75 and you have a foldable keyboard which fits in your pocket.] And without a cover or clamshell, some reviewers have rightly suggested the screen might easily get scratched.
But these are minor niggles. I’m seriously thinking about getting one for my inspirational visits to the hills where a laptop is too much, and the miserly screen of my Palm Tungsten not quite enough. Might even try some haiku.
Column: Under the Wire
UNDER THE WIRE
From 26 June 2003 edition of the Far Eastern Economic Review (c) 2003, Dow Jones & Company, Inc.
You’re Fired
SMS, or text messaging, is great for staying in touch but isn’t so hot for conveying bad news. A recent spate of dismissals via SMS — staff of British insurer Accident Group, for example, were notified by administrators from PricewaterhouseCoopers that they were being laid off and would no longer be paid — raises interesting ethical and legal questions about the medium. The new chief executive of Britain’s Vodafone Group, Arun Sarin, is taking no chances: His contract says he cannot be fired via “electronic mail or any other electronic messaging service.”
More on Spam
If you need more evidence that spam is big business, try this: DoubleClick, better known for its on-line advertising strategies, on June 12 announced initiatives “to further differentiate legitimate marketing communications from spam.” Given that I’ve seen very little difference in tactics between spammers and “legitimate marketing communications” I don’t find this particularly reassuring. Here’s something else: CNET, an on-line magazine, reported last week on a legal dispute between two anti-spam software makers over patents for something called challenge-response technology, which allows an e-mail recipient to check out the sender to see if he’s [a] a person, and [b] the person he says he is. The recipient receives an e-mail asking for verification, and if the e-mail goes unanswered, the e-mail gets dumped. Nice idea, but not rocket science, in my view, and kind of time wasting. Still, Mailblocks and Spam Arrest have been slugging it out, at least until a Washington district court denied Mailblocks a preliminary injunction. I stick by my advice: Go with free software developed by people genuinely committed to ridding us of spam, not to making money out of it. My Bayesian Filters from POPFile are working wonders: In the past week only five bits of spam have reached my inbox. But if you want to try out commercial solutions, here are a couple: AlienCamel [www.aliencamel.com], allows you to select what e-mails you want to allow through, and Spam Slicer [www.spamslicer.com] provides each user with a virtual e-mail ID, so the user can tell where a spammer got his name and can block subsequent spam from that source even if the spammer changes his e-mail address.
Keep Out the Hackers
Talking of sleaze, Zone Labs Inc. [www.zonealarm] have just released a new version of their excellent ZoneAlarm firewall program. If you have a computer connected to the Internet then you should have a firewall, software that does its best to prevent ne’er-do-wells from getting in, either to steal pictures of your dog’s wedding, or to use your computer to attack other computers. ZoneAlarm Pro 4.0 improves its security features, including one that examines not just inbound but outbound e-mails for harmful file attachments — usually a kind of virus called a worm. Another innovation gathers data on suspected hackers, helping security experts to track and report them to their moms. ZoneAlarm Pro sells for $50; a free version of the earlier model is still available, and should be enough for us amateurs.
Column: spyware
If you answered (a), then good luck to you. Not sure you need the sort of help I offer in this column. If you answered (b) or (c), then you’ll be pleased to know that while that kind of thing doesn’t happen very often in the shopping mall, it happens on-line. A lot. The only problem is that, unlike at the mall, you can’t call a policeman and have Placard Guy arrested.
Welcome to the wacky world of “behavioural marketing.” Enter, stage left, a United States-based company called The Gator Corporation. Enter, stage right, a student at Harvard Law School’s Berkman Centre for Internet and Society called Ben Edelman, one of the few people who have spent time trying to figure out how software from companies like Gator works.
What happens, Edelman reckons, is this: Gator presents itself as an innocent, free, program that helps you fill in on-line forms, remembering your passwords. You, the innocent surfer, download it and pretty soon you’re starting to get ads appearing over your browser window. Some pop up over what you’re reading, some appear behind it. Some slide across the screen. You, being innocent and unsuspecting, figure they are from the site you happen to be visiting. Later, you notice eerily relevant ads appearing where they shouldn’t be: an ad for a rival shipping company when you’re visiting DHL, say. Or a loan offer when you’re checking your bank account. This is the guy with the personalized billboard stalking you; this is behavioural marketing.
How can a piece of software that’s supposed to be helping you store personal information suddenly seem to know what you’re looking for on-line? The answer’s not a simple one, and it tells us something about how unregulated, and potentially hazardous, the Internet frontier is. Ben Edelman’s research tells us this: Gator software, once installed, will transmit your browsing habits — which Web sites you visit, how long you stay there, a unique ID number Gator has assigned you, and, for good measure, your zip code — back to Gator HQ. Based on that information, Gator HQ will transmit packages of targeted ads to your computer, which will then pop up miraculously as you browse the Internet.
Needless to say, a lot of companies are not too happy about this. How would you feel if your carefully designed site was suddenly being blotted out by someone else’s ads, especially if they were from a rival? Quite a few have launched legal challenges, including Dow Jones (the publisher of this magazine), which last year joined a group of 10 Web-site publishers in claiming that Gator’s pop-up ads violated copyright and trademark laws and allowed Gator to profit unjustly. This and most other cases have been settled before going to court, and their settlements have remained confidential.
What irks me is not that this software prevents companies from displaying what they want to on a screen (unless it happens to be over this column), but that it abuses the trust of casual Internet users. While Gator acknowledges it’s on your computer, it misleads you about what it’s really doing there. And plenty more such software — labelled “spyware,” for good reason — doesn’t even tell you that. And they’re a nightmare to get rid of: Uninstalling Gator normally, Edelman says, won’t necessarily remove it entirely, meaning it is still communicating with Gator HQ. What’s worse is what we don’t know: Gator says on its Web site that data it collects is not used to profile individual customers and declined to comment for this article, but in a recent interview with on-line tech magazine CNET, Gator’s senior vice-president for marketing, Scott Eagle, said of Edelman’s research: “Eighty percent of the magic is what he’ll never see. He’s only touching a part of the elephant”. Oddly, I don’t find that reassuring. As Edelman says of Gator: “From the design of the system, it could be tracking users’ behaviour in incredible detail.”
So what’s the solution? The simple answer is to banish all spyware. It slows things down, spits out information you should keep to yourself, and it fires back ads you could do without. Ad-aware from Lavasoft (www.lavasoftusa.com/software/adaware) does a great job of finding spyware on your PC and removing it safely. Be wary of free software offers, especially file-sharing services, screen savers, browser utilities, and “shopping assistants” (software that checks out prices for you), and, if you can’t be bothered to read all the legalspeak in user agreements, don’t install the software. And good luck with the back hair.
Here are some more tips to help you avoid spyware. If you need help storing passwords and personal details so you can access them on-line easily, try Siber Systems RoboForm software, which does everything that Gator does without the sneaky bits. Most browsers these days have features that do a lot of this, too: The latest version of Opera has a “wand” function that handles all your passwords, and has long sported a feature that can prepare your personal information (first name, gender, zip code) so you don’t have to type it in every time you visit a site that needs it.
For blocking pop-ups, try PopUpCop ($20 from www.popupcop.com), designed by a guy called Peter Eden who seems to take the whole thing very seriously (thankfully). Another spyware detection tool if you don’t like Ad-Aware: Patrick Kolla’s Spybot Search and Destroy (to be found at http://security.kolla.de/), which is both free and highly regarded.
To read more of Ben Edelman’s work on Gator, check out his Web site: http://cyber.law.harvard.edu/ people/edelman/ads/gator/. Still not enough? Check out ScumWare (www.scumware.com), which promises “the latest information on the lowest forms of Internet-traffic hijacking.”