Symphonious

I've caught up on the backlog of stuff to write about from the past couple of weeks where I've been preoccupied with moving house, mostly by dropping it off the list because it's just too old to be worth commenting on now. So now I'm off to the Gold Coast for christmas holidays with my darling fiance and her family. It's a tough life sometimes. Anyway, that means I won't be posting much here for a while again, possibly until the new year. So merry christmas all!

The Boston Globe:

AT&T Inc. and BellSouth Corp. are lobbying Capitol Hill for the right to create a two-tiered Internet, where the telecom carriers' own Internet services would be transmitted faster and more efficiently than those of their competitors.

Why does that not surprise me? In the end though this is very bad for consumers who are paying for internet access and deserve to get the best speeds possible for the best price possible for whatever services they want to use it for.

Berin Loritsch:

I've discovered why I'm lacking motivation for our Software Design Document at work. It's tedious. It isn't the creative part of the effort. It's boring!

The trouble with boring design documents is not just that they're boring to write, they're boring to read as well - so noone does.

In our most recent round of design documents at Ephox, we took some advice from Joel on Software and started injecting humor into the docs. So instead of just anyone inserting a table into a document, now it's Miss Piggy creating a table of Kermit's good and bad points - complete with a picture of Miss Piggy and Kermit. At one point we actually had half the engineering team rushing off to read the specification documents just so they could laugh at the stories.

Behind the humor though is real user actions, requirements and UI design, just done using a more interesting setting than "the user".

Ben Laurie:

…because it actually affects peoples lives, and not in a positive way: studies have shown that if people believe they are being observed, then they tend to alter their behaviour to match what they think the observer wants to see. I want people to be able to do their thing without fear of consequences from bigots or The Man or even “ordinary people”. None of us are ordinary and the world will be a poorer place if we were made to be.

I've seen this argument come up a couple of times recently but it seems to be seriously underrepresented in my opinion. This is the key response to the "you only care about privacy if you've got something to hide" argument. Essentially, we all have something we hide from various people and even if we don't mind them finding out, just the fact that we know someone is watching makes us behave differently.

There are just so many elements to this story that seem so wrong. First a teacher brings porn to school on their laptop. Secondly that students were suspended for accidentally coming across it but mostly that they were suspended for hacking because they answered an obvious question when prompted:

"The hacking involved a dialogue box coming up on the screen which asked which car do you drive," one of the boys' parents told the paper.

"One of the boys typed in a Holden and then this image came up of the woman as a screensaver. We are furious that the boys were suspended."

This whole concept of hacking being getting access to anything you weren't intended to is ridiculous. There really should be some kind of requirement that a conscious effort was made to get there. I would be okay with it even if the conscious effort involved something like a dialog that said "Access only allowed to Adrian Sutton. Are you Adrian Sutton?" and if you click yes it lets you in. At least it lets you know that you're not supposed to be there even if it's horrendously bad security.

Society really needs to find a way to calm down about "cyber-terrorism" and start focussing more on script kiddies and viruses.