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.
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.
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:
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.
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.
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?
An interesting chart from the ICTD conference reflecting the theme of papers submitted in the years 2006-2010 (minus 2008). Mobile has grown massively in the past couple of years–particularly surprising given that in 2007 the number of papers had actually shrunk.
This reflects the impact of the mobile phone on the developing world in the past couple of years, as well as perhaps a slowly dawning realization that for many people in these regions the mobile phone is not only their first telephone, it’s their first computer and first Internet device.
It’s also intriguing that radio has disappeared from the equation. A mistake, in my humble view. It’s still important in a lot of regions. I’m not quite sure what ‘network’ means here, but that seems to have disappeared too. Finally, note how the number of papers mentioning PCs has shrunk as well.