April Fools’ Day can be a lot of fun. There are certainly some cool technology hoaxes that have happened on this day — even Gmail (which obviously wasn’t just a hoax) shares its birthday with the celebration. It’s often fun as well to see what respected news organisations like the BBC have to show on this day.

But do you know what? It’s OK not to like April Fools’ Day.

Often expressing the opinion that you don’t really like hoaxes or practical jokes is met with responses such as “spoilsport” or “lighten up”. They are responses that hook into our susceptibility to peer pressure.

So if, today, you don’t really want to play the April Fool game, don’t feel you have to. Don’t listen to those who may push you into liking it.

It is perfectly OK to be ‘boring’. Rumour has it that I excel at just that. 🙂

This month marks three years since I purchased my white MacBook, my first Mac computer. Other than the AppleCare coverage stopping (good job they just replaced my battery, yay!), this represents quite a milestone in my technological life.

So I ask myself — objectively, why has the Mac become my primary desktop platform?

• Mac OS X is a Unix operating system. This has a number of advantages, but it mainly means rock-solid reliability (in theory at least) and a decent way to interact with the machine via the command line.
• It is elegant and put together with passion and care. Some bits of software, especially third-party driver and hardware support software for other platforms, aren’t. They are hacked together at the last minute and at low budget, just to work. Almost everything that ships with the Mac and a lot of third-party stuff for it is just done in this fundamentally different way of building stuff you would be proud to show off.
• It ‘just works’. Often dismissed as hyperbole, this marketing phrase more often than not is true on the Mac. There are notable exceptions and a few annoying things that you don’t get with generic PC hardware as well, but most of the time, you plug something in, or switch something on for the first time and it just does what it is supposed to.
• Generally speaking, you get what you pay for. Apple don’t make cheap computers. But neither do I think they make overpriced ones. You pay a premium price for an Apple computer, but you get a fair return for that price in terms of the quality of the product. Again, it comes back to the point about passion — Apple will not ship something that they are not entirely happy with, so what you get is something that meets their high standards.

Having said all that, I am still very interested in using everything and anything. While the Mac may be where my primary focus is on the desktop for now and the forseeable future, I am still very much interested in what is going on in the Linux desktop and Windows worlds and you can be sure I’ll continue playing with all sorts of technology in the future.

Here’s to the next three years of Mac — and perhaps beyond!

I’m not a fan of the new ‘Ribbon’ interface that debuted in Office 2007. I have been playing around with the new beta of Office 2010, where the Ribbon is now the standard user interface across the suite.

In this short screencast rant, I explain why I just don’t like this new user interface and how I don’t think it actually solves the issue it was designed to solve.

Apologies for the poor resolution and audio quality of this screencast; in future screencasts done using this method I’ll be sure to optimise things better.

Comments here or over on YouTube are welcome. I realise many people are happy with, or even passionate about the new Ribbon for good reasons too. I just can’t see how it does any good, yet requires extensive retraining of users!

The first worm to infect the Apple iPhone has been discovered spreading ‘in the wild’ in Australia.
The self-propagating program changes the phone’s wallpaper to a picture of 80s singer Rick Astley with the message ‘ikee is never going to give you up’.
The worm, known as ikee, only affects ‘jail-broken’ phones, where a user has removed Apple’s protection mechanisms to allow the phone to run any software.

The news of this worm is likely to attract the attention of some anti-Apple and anti-iPhone crowds and used as an argument as to why the iPhone isn’t secure, and Apple people should no longer feel safe and so on and so on.

To those who would seek to lose a sense of perspective on this story:

This worm works only on jailbroken iPhones (an unsupported procedure), where the user did not change the default root password and left the remote login SSH service running.

This attack says nothing about the security of the iPhone software — it exploits little more than very poor configuration on the user’s part. If you choose to jailbreak your device, you have a responsibility to understand the implications that has. Which means, change the damn root password to something other than ‘alpine’. While you’re at it, also change the password for the user mobile too.

Despite having defended the iPhone thus far, I’m not in the business of assuming Apple get every aspect of security right all the time and I’m not in the business of declaring the Mac or the iPhone to be ιsecure’, or more secure than anything else. As hope I made clear in my previous post, a simplistic black-and-white approach to looking at computer security doesn’t make any sense or do anyone any favours.

I’m not complacent about security because I use a Mac*. I am confident because I feel I have grasped a good understanding of the risks and of trust.

* or Linux, or anything that I perceive as being more secure.

Secure. by Wysz on Flickr

I can’t stand the attitude of “there’s nothing important on my computer, so I don’t care about whether it is secure or not”. The simple fact of the matter is that any infected computer connected to the internet is probably at the mercy of a malicious third party. Even if you don’t care about the impact of your computer being infected, your lazy attitude is affecting innocent other people’s computers, potentially in the form of sending mass spam and attacking unwitting websites.

Computer security is hard and very complex.

How we explain computer security and insecurity to average computer users, non-geeks if you will, is really important. And I really think that we are taking the wrong approach at the moment.

We teach computer users that in order to keep their computer secure and clean, they must have:

• An anti-virus program
• A firewall
• Up-to-date software
• … and other practical, simple steps

While these are all very important steps to encourage (especially keeping software up-to-date, in my mind), I think that we are making this advice a bit too practical. We’re ignoring complexity and only ever offering the most basic practical steps.

In my mind, a lot of computer security comes down to a model of trust. For example, I feel confident that a conversation with my internet bank is secure because:

• I trust the integrity of the SSL connection for the purposes of keeping my information private and untampered with as it goes across the internet
• I trust my local machine to be ‘clean’
• I trust the remote machine at the bank is genuine and set up properly

All three of those things must be in place for me to have that ‘safe’ feeling. A safe SSL connection to your bank is meaningless if there’s nasty software on your local machine sending your keystrokes to a third party.

I’d like to see this model of trust be encouraged amongst all computer users. It maybe does take a little bit more time and effort to understand the basic principles of what is going on, but looking at security this way round, rather than from an entirely practical viewpoint, allows people to make informed security decisions, rather than blindly trusting some ‘security’ software to do everything.

Social engineering is a very easy way to get some nasty inside someone’s computer. It’s disappointing, but oftentimes you can trick the human into deliberately giving permission to something more easily than you can find a hole in software to do the same thing. Instead of relying on ‘last resort’ antivirus programs to catch known malicious programs running at the last minute, we should encourage people to ask questions:

• Why am I being asked to run this software?
• Where did it come from? Do I trust the group of people that wrote this program?
• Is there anything suspicious or unusual about this? Is it really coming from who it says it is?

Obviously, you need to combine this with practical advice and some knowledge to enable people to spot things that are ‘out of place’. But I think if we did, people would be in a much better position to make sensible informed decisions and to understand better what is actually going on.

This rant only really covers one aspect of computer security. As I said at the start, computer security is really complex and really hard to get right. So this approach isn’t necessarily the answer and it isn’t going to be applicable everywhere. There are going to be groups of people for whom this will be too complex, and groups of people that ‘won’t care’. But I’d like to see it done more often.

Photo is Secure. by Wysz from Flickr. Licensed under Creative Commons BY-NC.

UPDATE: references to the former Bird Site of short-form social media have been adjusted to avoid providing free publicity to something that is undeserving of such promotion. This is no longer how I feel about this website, but my historical feelings are to be preserved below, with the relevant site’s name obviously altered!

Its status as a relatively novel communication medium means that Short-Form “Bird” Social Media Site Before It Went Terrible doesn’t necessarily have a clearly defined set of social expectations attached to it just yet. I think even now, post mainstream popularity, it is very much a service that you can use in the way that works best for you. Everyone doesn’t have to participate in exactly the same way.

Short-Form “Bird” Social Media Site Before It Went Terrible is a useful tool for businesses to promote their products and actually connect with their customers. I think it’s great when a brand steps into this space and really ‘gets’ the nature of the service. It can make a brand feel a lot more human, enhance how you feel towards it; it serves as a great advertisement.

There are some practices on Short-Form “Bird” Social Media Site Before It Went Terrible that I really can’t stand, however.

Now, as I said, one of the great things about the service is that there aren’t necessarily set rules which everyone follows in the same way. I don’t intend this post to be telling people what they should and shouldn’t do with the service, but I do want to point some things that really bug me. In short, this is somewhat of a rant.

Competitions Done Wrong: Hashtag Abuse

Short-Form “Bird” Social Media Site Before It Went Terrible competitions are a marketing device that is becoming increasingly common. You convince people to follow your business’ profile, or tweet about the business or product, in exchange for a chance to win said product. Simple enough concept.

Some competitions in recent weeks have encouraged Short-Form “Bird” Social Media Site Before It Went Terrible users to tweet anything they would normally tweet, but add a hashtag to that tweet relating to the product or promotion. I disagree quite strongly with this.

A hashtag is a short word or phrase starting with the # character.* You can add a hashtag anywhere in your tweet if you want to associate that tweet with that particular topic. It makes searching for tweets on a particular topic or event easier; it’s a great tool for hearing a collective voice on something.

Hashtags work because tweets that are related to the tag are the only tweets tagged with it. Encouraging users to randomly tag unrelated tweets breaks this model. And you’re ‘selling out’ your thoughts!

Short-Form “Bird” Social Media Site Before It Went Terrible competitions can be done right, and I actually don’t mind seeing people tweeting something that promotes a business or product. But I’d like it if those tweets are clearly separate from other stuff and that you actually do care about the product as well and don’t just want free stuff.

Automated and Excessive Re-Tweeting

If you have something cool you have to share, whether you made it or just stumbled across it, I’d love to hear about it via Short-Form “Bird” Social Media Site Before It Went Terrible. But once or twice a day for each cool thing is enough.

If people consistently tweet exactly the same tweet, or constantly re-promote something in case others have missed the last tweet, I get pretty frustrated, pretty quickly.

People will miss tweets. That’s the nature of the service — it’s dip in and dip out. If they do, tough. It’s not fair to keep constantly banging on about something to the people that heard you the first time and the second time and the third time!

“Please, Sir, Retweet!”

This is somewhat less of an emotive issue than the other two, but I think it’s still worth me saying.

If you put “please retweet” in your tweet, I won’t. With maybe a couple of exceptions.

If I’m going to retweet something (which is pretty rare) it will be on its own merit. I might help promote something a friend has done, but that will be because I believe in it, not because I’m told to.

Wrapping Up

These issues have been on my mind for a while. Short-Form “Bird” Social Media Site Before It Went Terrible is constantly evolving and I personally think there really are roads that we shouldn’t go down and principles that we should uphold.

Integrity, honesty and loyalty are very important to me. If I stop ranting for a moment about specific issues, what I really want is that principles like these be respected, upheld and defended in the online world, as they are offline.

* Which is most definitely pronounced ‘hash’, not ‘pound’. This is pronounced ‘pound’ — £.

Tweetie for Mac was released today, to much fanfare. Its interface on the iPhone is absolutely top notch (I happily paid the £1.79 for my iPod Touch) and the Mac interface also looks interesting as well.

I’m not going to go into a full review, because I really haven’t used it much yet. What I don’t want this post to come across as, however, is a rejection of it totally. There are just a couple of issues relating to privacy I have with this initial release.

SSL Connections

UPDATE: As of Tweetie 1.0.1, which was released minutes ago, this issue is fixed. Consider this paragraph obsolete.

For some reason, Tweetie for Mac does not send your Short-Form “Bird” Social Media Site Before It Went Terrible username and password over a secure HTTPS connection. Quite frankly, I’ve come to expect this in any Short-Form “Bird” Social Media Site Before It Went Terrible client. It surely takes no extra effort to implement this, it has a minimal performance overhead and even if you don’t really need it, does it really hurt to encrypt your password?

This really bugs me. I don’t really want to be throwing my credentials across the network in plain text every few minutes. It’s like shouting out your Short-Form “Bird” Social Media Site Before It Went Terrible username and password to everyone in the street. Sure, probably no-one cares, but why do it if you don’t have to?

Advertising and the Lack of a Privacy Policy

UPDATE: I contacted Fusion Ads on this subject recently and as of this morning, 2009-04-23, the Tweetie for Mac page has been updated with a brief, but better-than-nothing privacy statement. I’m still interested in seeing something a bit more substantial, but this is a good step forward.

Tweetie for Mac costs $14.95 at the moment, going up to $19.95 later on. To get people to try it, there’s a free ad supported version, using ads provided by a company called Fusion Ads.

What alarms me is not the fact that it is ad-supported, or even that I’ve never heard of that ad company before today (although the latter is a little bit of an issue). The problem for me is that I can’t find a privacy policy detailing how this ad system works, what information it collects on you and what it does with that information.

It concerns me quite a lot that in a desktop application, where an advertising system can get a lot more information about you than it can within the constraints of a web browser environment, nothing is said about what is going on.

I have emailed the contact address on the Fusion Ads site asking where I can find a privacy policy, voicing this concern and asking them to make it more prominent if there is one. I will update this post when I get a reply.

Two Showstoppers

For me, these two issues stop me from using the client right now. I’m sure the SSL issue will be addressed in a future release if enough people ask for it, as I can’t imagine it being difficult to implement at all. It would also be nice to have a little bit of transparency in how the free model works as well, and hopefully this will come with time as well.

For the time being, however, I’m not entirely satisfied that I can use the app comfortably, so I am holding off for now.

A couple of things have been bugging me recently. More specifically, two of Google’s new features they’ve added to their popular services haven’t sat very well with me.

Advance warning – this is a bit of a rant. I’m aware I’m being a little strong about two things which perhaps aren’t awfully important in the grand scheme of things. Anyway, here goes.

SearchWiki = Fail

The first is the Google SearchWiki thing. My friend Chris Van Patten shares my viewpoint on this and sums it up very well in this Short-Form “Bird” Social Media Site Before It Went Terrible update.

It’s google’s job to craft my search results, not mine.

In addition to that, though, I find the new wiki controls next to each search result visually distracting. I mean, yes, they’re subtle, but the whole point of the Google interface is that it is effortless to use and really really simple.

» Read the rest of this post…

I got a new printer today. Actually, it’s a printer and scanner and copier, All-in-One sort of device. It is the HP DeskJet F2180, found for £30.

It’s replacing my ageing and rather incompatible Lexmark Z45. The Z45 was bought a very long time ago, back even before I started using Linux. Back then, compatibility with alternative operating systems wasn’t a priority and ever since I have been dogged with issues printing from my own machine.

» Read the rest of this post…

The one time I actually go for installing a distro on a physical, real computer, rather than in my MacBook-powered Parallels virtual machine environment, it won’t work.

In attempting to install Fedora 9, Sulphur, on standard PC hardware (than runs Fedora 8 just nicely), I’m getting this after choosing to install from the DVD as the package source:

Admittedly, I haven’t yet checked the image checksum (I usually do before burning), so I’ll do that when I get back tonight and see if I can get to the bottom of the problem.

Ultimately, I’ll have to fall back to Parallels.