Just want to apologize to everyone who has been posting comments over the past year or so and not see them appear. I wasn’t censoring; I just wasn’t aware that they were all going into a spam queue and that I wasn’t being notified. My fault, and I’ve posted as many as I can. Thanks for all the comments and sorry I wasn’t there to post them and reply at the time. I shall try to do better, and move this whole circus over to WordPress as soon as I can.
Google Voice Blog
I seem to have missed the fact that Google Voice is now available outside the U.S. Seems to work well, too, and, at least in my part of the world, half the price of Skype. With Skype’s growing footprint on my desktop, I’m all for dumping the klutz where I can.
Why Banks Make It Harder To Play Safe
This just landed in my inbox: more proof, if it were needed, that banks are dumber than a sack of nails when it comes to security. Or they just don’t care:
The email comes ostensibly from HSBC’s Singapore office. But it’s actually mailed by 8rewardsroad.com, a Singapore-based marketing company with a somewhat dodgy website. (As in the pages don’t seem to load without Flash and some pretty awful stuff.) They claim among their clients HSBC and OCBC, another Singapore bank. In other words, no easy way to tell whether the email is really from the bank or not.
The email itself offers up to $S400 per customer, though reading the fine print you—and the person you’re referring–have got to jump through a lot of hoops first.
But that’s not the beef. The beef is that this could so easily be a phishing scam. And even though it’s not, the fact that a bank is sending these emails out contradicts its claims that it won’t communicate by email with customers except to send them notifications of e-statements and other obvious forms of communication. Getting emails like this just lowers customers’ guard. And the tempting element, with the red Refer now button prominently displayed twice on the email, doesn’t help matters.
Worse, if you click on that link you go to a website www.apps.asiapacific.hsbc.com – which to the uninitiated could be any website, and is definitely not the hsbc.com.sg that the bank’s Singapore customers usually go to. There, referring customers are asked to give a lot of detail about themselves, and the person they’re referring, including what kind of bank account they have, their passport/ID number, their banking relationship manager, etc etc. Enough for a social engineer to get somewhere with.
I despair that banks will get the security thing. I really don’t think they care. They certainly don’t seem to care enough to stop their marketing department putting out toxic trash like this.
Pride Gulp
Swallowed my pride and bought an Air. It was cheaper than the other options and people I respect are happy with theirs. And it’s nice. But the OS is as quirky as any Windows machine. EG:
- no apparent way to turn off system-wide spellchecking without some system-level hack.
- in Pages, wherever you open a document, from whatever folder, the save prompt won’t, by default, be in that folder.
- to use the App Store the first time you may need to log in and out again, despite it registering and displaying your credit card details and other account information correctly. No error message appears; just nothing happens when you try to buy something.
- when programs install, there’s no obvious way to find them. Indeed, to me the installation process is only slightly less cumbersome than in Windows. I’m still confused as to which icon to click to launch an app.
- backgrounds: Windows gives you many more options for setting colors and tones. Unless I’m missing something. Why can I only have a choice of eight colors for my background? Why not all the colors of the rainbow?
- the Mac App Store is cute, but misleading. First off, it’s cheaper to buy the iWorks components there than take up the offer of preinstalled versions. Secondly, you can’t download any trial versions–at least I’ve not found any–at the App Store, whereas many of these apps are available as trial versions if you visit their homepage. I know this is not solely a Mac failing, but it shouldn’t happen. We’re going backwards.
There’s no question Macs are better designed. The Air is a very nice machine. I’m happy with mine, though I still glance across at my Toughbook.
But what intrigues me is that there are just as many frustrations for the first time user, let alone a refugee from Microsoft, as with any Windows machine. There are plenty of forums where people exchange their frustrations (and some extremely fiddly solutions). And yet you rarely hear folk talk of these gripes.
Inevitably one has to adapt to a new UI. I’ve tried to look beyond that and point out areas where I feel the OS is either illogical or deliberately limiting. I hope time (or fanboyz) put me wrong.
via ScribeFire
Myth 1: ICTs will save the world. « The ICT4D Jester
My bet, though, is that even in 2020, 10 years after this writing, the poor – even the mobile-owning, Internet-surfing, technology-savvy poor – will still be with us. Mobile phone owners won’t be much better off than they were before, and owning a mobile phone, however fancy and Internet-enabled, won’t do squat for helping a person out of poverty, illness, ignorance, or misery. Sure, we’ll hear a heart-warming story of a poor basket weaver climbing out of poverty because of the dial-a-job-mobile-service-for-migrant-laborers, but that will be a handful of cases. Meanwhile, we’ll also see the heart-wrenching story of the parents who forewent food for their children to feed their phones (see Kathleen Diga’s PhD thesis for early evidence in Uganda [x]). Technology will help some and hurt some, and in the end, it’ll all come out a wash.
via ict4djester.org
Powerful stuff. And probably true. My sense, though, is that cellphones tend to defy the notion that technology is impoverishing–poor people going into debt to buy televions, cars, refrigerators and computers–because of what I would call ‘coping technologies’, not least the missed call. Which is a way of transfering the cost to someone else (either the person who has to call back, or, more likely, the operator whose masts the missed calls travels over.
The other thing is that cellphones are getting cheaper, both to buy and use. I wonder whether there’s a point at which it does become, like the telephone before it, a social and economic enabler? Maybe the Jester is only half right?