An End to Profanity

By | October 22, 2008
0 Comment

By Jeremy Wagstaff

We all want to encourage our grandparents, children, and others of a sensitive disposition, to venture online. But not if they end up on a video-sharing web-site like YouTube, where the comments appear to have all been written by people in extreme emotional pain, or a Facebook group, where robust language is considered de rigeur.

And how about those online gaming sessions, where you can pit your Xbox skills against someone you’ve never met? What’s made this more fun in recent years is the advent of services that let you speak to the other people you’re playing with at the same time. Great, except for the fact you might find, in the words of one web-site, “the profanasaurus on the other end of the mike is a schoolboy still at the age where yelling random insults at strangers seems amusing.”

Technology, belatedly, is coming to the rescue. Microsoft—maker of the Xbox–has just received a patent for something called an “automatic censoring filter” that can remove undesirable speech in real-time. The undesired word or words would be made unintelligible or inaudible. Of course, many of us would be happy to apply this kind of technology in our daily lives, at home or in the office.

Which, to a certain extent, we can. If you use the popular but not overly popular Internet browser called Firefox, you can install an extra add-on which allows you to do your own web-page censoring. It’s quite simple, really: just choose the words you don’t want to encounter in your daily browsing, and when they appear on a page they’ll be replaced by a gap, or by words of your own choosing. (You can find more details here: http://is.gd/4m1L)

A comment on YouTube, for example, would now look something like this: hey you [charming expletive], why don’t you [charming expletive] my [charming expletive] you [charming expletive]. It’s not Shakespeare, but it won’t make Gran blush and you can still catch the writer’s drift.

All these ribald comments, however, may be a thing of the past. A cartoonist called Randall Munroe recently drew a comic strip in which someone writes a computer virus forcing people who leave sophomoric comments on YouTube to listen back to what they’ve written before they post it. Needless to say they realize how stupid they sound and stop. (You can find the comic strip here: http://xkcd.com/481/)

YouTube seem to have taken the idea to heart, and have now added a button below the box where you add your comments that says Audio Preview. Press it and a robotic voice will read back what you’ve typed in the box. (And yes, it will include any profanity you care to include.) The hope? People adding absurd and insulting comments may realize how puerile they sound before they hit the post button.

This is an excellent ruse, but I fear that those people who think vulgar language is a form of rapier wit are already lost. The battle would seem to be to try to help those who make poor choices in their online interactions only when under the influence of alcohol. These might involve impassioned declarations of love or hate for ex-partners, say, or recommendations to bosses about where they might put their staff assessments, that would never have been made in the cold hard light of day.

Technology can’t really save you from such poor choices, but it can throw up a few road blocks. A mobile phone service in Australia, for example, has introduced a service called Dialing Under the Influence which allows you to blacklist numbers you think you might feel the urge to call at some point during the evening when you’re not thinking as clearly as you should be.

Google has just introduced an online equivalent for their Gmail program called Goggles, that requires the sender to perform some simple math problems before sending any email to an ex or to your entire staff when you’re at your most vulnerable: late at night at weekends, for example. The thinking is that if you’re sober enough to be able to do the math, then probably your message is not going to get you into trouble. (Details here: http://is.gd/3D55)

All good helpful and public spirited stuff. Sad, though, that technology has now taken on the role of trying to save us from ourselves.

©2008 Loose Wire

Jeremy Wagstaff is a commentator on technology and appears regularly on the BBC World Service. He can be found online at jeremywagstaff.com or via email at jeremy@loose-wire.com.

Why You Should Pay for Your Email

By | December 23, 2011
8 Comments

image

Screenshot from Search Engine Journal.

(update Dec 2011: Aliencamel is now more, unfortunately, and Fastmail has been sold to Opera.)

Using free email accounts like Gmail is commonplace, but not without risk. As Loren Baker, an editor at SearchEngine Journal, found to his cost, when Google disabled his account without warning. (At the time of writing there’s no explanation why his account was suspended, nor whether it had been resolved.)

The comments are supportive, but also point out the dangers of relying on a free service for business. This point, in particular, struck home; when it’s “free”, we’re not really the customers, except insofaras we’re the recipient of ads:

[such services] see the money coming from the investors rather than the users. Without monetary payment they are not even “customers”.

So what are the alternatives? Well, hosted email makes a lot of sense. If you’ve got your own domain, better to use that. But there’s also paid email services which, until Gmail came along, were where the smart users usually went.

So I asked a couple of them, AlienCamel and Fastmail, to give me five reasons why paid email services are better than free. Here’s what they had to say:

Here are Sydney Low’s of AlienCamel:

  1. No ads, no robots crawling through personal stuff
  2. Email infrastructure is expensive, you get what you pay for
  3. We backup your emails in US and in Europe
  4. Our spam blocking technology – pending email advisory – is patented and unique
  5. We’re limiting our growth to 2500 accounts – so it’ll always be fast and good

As a follow-up I asked him to elaborate on the last point: the logical thing would be that a larger provider would provide better support. His response:

Syd: scaling email backend is not linear – to go from about 3000 accounts and have the features and backup/redundancy, we would have to build a platform that would go to 10-20,000 accounts as a fixed cost business, we would need to not only spend $ on the infrastructure, we would have to spend $$$ on marketing to get the customers to pay for that infrastructure so, the business grows in complexity, cost, and we lose the closeness to the customer.

Jeremy: so a ’boutique’ email service is probably a better bet, in your view, than a mega one?

Syd: I believe so.

Here’s what Jeremy Howard of Fastmail had to say (abbreviated for space and fairness). Fastmail has been in the business a while, and is the provider of choice for those groups like Falun Gong who fear hacking by nefarious agents of the enemy (Chinese government, cough): 

  1. Support. FastMail has help for for pre-sales/configuration help and ongoing help
  2. Specialization. Free accounts are all about maximising ad revenue, not maximising your productivity
  3. Archival and compliance: FastMail provides 2 levels of archival – journalling of all of a business’s sent/received mail to a separate (searchable) archive mailbox, and on-line per-folder backups which can be used to restore a complete folder on demand. Also: searchable, complete, unmodifiable journal of all sent and received email for compliance.
  4. Supervision and control of staff’s use of business email, for security, policy-enforcement, and training purposes.
  5. Reliability.  Every email on FastMail’s systems has five levels of redundancy – Redundent HDD storage (i.e. RAID) on both a primary and real-time replica system, plus a complete on-line backup (accessible at a per-folder level).

It’s interesting stuff. It also highlights how we are perhaps being a bit too cavalier with the most important part of our lives—email has crossed the line between private and business, so many of us use our email accounts for both (Palin, cough.) Given that, we need to think hard about how we use that email, and whether free email is a false economy.

Should Journalists Pay for Information?

By | November 22, 2011
1 Comment

A tricky one, this, and easy to get on one’s high horse but not analyse one’s own self interest. 

Robert Boynton here does a good job of exploring this in more detail, concluding:

As professional skeptics, though, we should be suspicious of the knee-jerk way in which journalists invoke the “no money for information” rule. How convenient that our personal gain and our profession’s ethical principles are so perfectly aligned! Isn’t it possible that this prohibition is simultaneously true and a way of banishing awkward questions of money and exchange from our moral calculations? In the murky intimacy that comes with immersion reporting, we owe our sources everything. Perhaps this is why we try so hard to avoid the topic.

I quite agree. In Asia it’s hard to draw a line somewhere, and I’ve covered sleazy politicians and (even sleazier) tech PR companies, all of whom expect to get something for something. One former minister in the Habibie government insisted on money for an interview after he’d retired, arguing that it taught journalists the value of information (I argued it only taught them the price of it) and another, a senior politician and minister who is now a presidential candidate, demanded 9 million rupiah (then a little under $1000) for an interview. (We didn’t pay.)

But it’s easy to get all pompous about this. As Boynton points out, it’s sometimes easier to teach the ethics of journalism (the theory) than to teach good journalism (the practice).

And, more important, I think journalism is under far more serious threat from the other side: journalists accepting payment or making financial compromises in exchange for print space. More on that anon.

In the meantime, this all came up because I was asked to explain the ethics behind refusing to pay for information and found I couldn’t, at least in a way that made any sense. The example arose with a school run by nuns reportedly demanding money for access to records of a former pupil, now famous. They were tired, I guess, of the time and effort of catering to sweaty film crews stomping through their office.

They have my sympathies, and if one crew agrees to pay, a precedent has been set in the nuns’ eyes that is hard to quarrel with. They’re not out to make a buck; they’re just tired of diverting resources to something that they’re not being hired (or asked by God, presumably) to do.

Good luck to them. But they need to see it from the perspective of the journalist, too. Paying a nun for information isn’t likely to compromise the information very much, but how about if the person was a pimp/drug dealer/thief/killer/banker? How tainted is the information—and the relationship between the journalist and her source—then?

I guess my advice in that situation would be for a journalist or news organisation worried about such perceptions to offer money to a charity of the source’s choosing but from which they would not benefit directly;  the purpose of giving the money is to acknowledge the time and effort that went into providing the information, but not actually attaching a value to the information itself. It’s also acknowledging the more important principle: that, however much we’d like to think otherwise, information is money in our business—indeed that is our business, turning information into money–and we shouldn’t be too prissy about acknowledging that fact.

CJR: Checkbook Journalism Revisited

Serial Number Killers

By | November 22, 2011
0 Comment

image

I’ve been mulling the issue of registering and activating software of late, and while I feel users generally are less averse to the process of having to enter a serial number or activating a program before they can use it than before, I think there’s still a lot of frustration out there.

And I know from clients that it’s a balancing act between upsetting users and not encouraging those who seem unable or unwilling to pay to have a free ride.

It seems to me to boil down to this: Users who have paid for software expect to be able to use it out of the box. It would be like taking a bread maker home and having to call the manufacturer before you can start making bread.

What’s more, customers shouldn’t have to cope with silly technical problems that aren’t their fault. The example above is from my efforts to test Adobe’s latest version of Acrobat. The initial installation failed, and now it’s blocking the legitimate serial number it previously accepted—on the same machine. I still haven’t found a way around this problem, so my ardour for things Adobe has diminished a little.

The problem is that it’s fixable. I can yell at Adobe and hopefully I’ll get another serial number. But that’s not going to happen now—when I need it. It’s going to happen in 24, 48, 72 hours’ time. By which time I may feel like a mug for buying the software in the first place.

Here’s a possible solution: An automated temporary serial number that will work until a proper serial number can be available. This could be delivered online—say, a bot on IM, where you enter the serial number that’s not working and get issued a temporary one that does. Or a product could come with two serial numbers, one a permanent one and one a backup one.

Once customer service comes online and fixes the problem, the emergency serial number can be deactivated. As it lasts only for, say, 48 hours it would be relatively worthless to pirates. It will also push software companies to ensure they get back to frustrated customers within the allotted time or risk further wrath.

Either way, software manufacturers have got to make it easy for users to get around the limitations, and frailties, of the registration and activation process. Users should never be left in the lurch for even an hour if they’re a legitimate customer. It’s up to the software companies to address this issue. Perhaps something like this already exists, but if not I think an emergency serial number might be an answer.

How to Set Vacation Email Messages

By | October 15, 2008
0 Comment

I’ve written elsewhere of the hazard of setting a blanket auto-respond email message in Microsoft Outlook. Many programs and services have ways for you to tweak these settings so that only your contacts—those people in your address book—receive these messages. (This does not remove the chances of revealing information you don’t want to bad guys, but it does significantly reduce it):

Gmail

In Gmail, got to settings

image

and then scroll down to vacation responder.

image

Make sure you check the button at the bottom of the window Only send a response to people in my contacts.

image

Hotmail

in Hotmail, you’ll find the same option in Options/Vacation reply.

image

Microsoft Outlook 2007

Outlook has something similar, so long as your account is on the Microsoft Exchange Server (usually meaning you’re on your office network). There you can also select whether the auto-replies go to people outside or inside your organisation, etc:

image

Mozilla Thunderbird

There’s no in-built way to do it. Here’s a workaround, explained in more detail here, but it’s not pretty, and it depends on your computer remaining on and connected.

(My thanks to Brett Roberts of Microsoft New Zealand for suggestions.)