Google’s announcement late yesterday about the launch of the Google Chrome Operating System puts Microsoft square in its sights. The announcement is chock full of little jabs clearly aimed at Microsoft:

“the operating systems that browsers run on were designed in an era where there was no web”

“Google Chrome OS is an open source, lightweight operating system that will initially be targeted at netbooks. Later this year we will open-source its code”

“The user interface is minimal to stay out of your way, and most of the user experience takes place on the web.”

“we are going back to the basics and completely redesigning the underlying security architecture of the OS so that users don’t have to deal with viruses, malware and security updates. It should just work.”

“we believe choice will drive innovation for the benefit of everyone, including Google”

“We hear a lot from our users and their message is clear — computers need to get better. “

The best news is that the description of the upcoming operating system reads like a response to the “top 10 pet peeves” that people have with today’s bloated systems. Here’s a few of them:

• Fast: boots in seconds
• Web based user experience
• Large footprint – works on browsers on Win/Mac/Linux
• Universally accessible data
• Open source – code will be opened “later this year”
• Range of devices – from netbooks to desktop systems
• ARM and x86 support

Can’t wait to see the Microsft response to this. No doubt they’ve imagined this day might eventually arrive – but they’ll need more than bing to counter the Google threat. If anything, the conclusion here is that the OS itself is no longer the seat of competitive advantage. It’s not even clear how much leverage the desktop computing environment is going to have long term anyway if game console and mobile phone manufacturers have their way. This is less about Google getting into the “OS business” and more about the shift of computing into the cloud – the only platform that matters. Apple, Google, Microsoft and a huge number of wild cards are all jockeying for position there, and each bring very different competitive assets to the table. It promises to be an interesting horse race.

Inspired elsewhere, I think this image captures the emerging competitive dynamic nicely:

Other aspects of Natal include identity recognition, interaction with virtual characters, and some nice augmented reality tricks like fishing (reminiscent of Reactrix or GestureTek’s virtual fishponds) and being able to pass a piece of paper into a virtual world (see what appears to be a carefully scripted video below):

While the technology isn’t expected to be released for some time (unlikely if it will even appear in 2010).  Microsoft says it projects a long life for the Xbox 360 (out to 2015)  and Microsoft’s  Shane Kim says, “Project Natal is a great innovation. It will work with every Xbox 360 sold.”

Not to be outdone, Sony also had some intesting technology to reveal at E3. A new motion controller that looks like a lot like a handheld microphone. This device appears to have extremely low latency and extremely accurate positioning. You can see for yourself in the video below:

A couple years back a French company (does anyone remember the name) had advanced augmented reality demonstrations that look a lot like this one (I’ll post the video if I can track it down), and it would be interesting to know if Sony ended up working with them or developed this in parallel.

Update: Thanks Derek for correctly identifying the French company as Total Immersion. Even more interesting still is that they list Sony on their client page. Here’s Total Immersion’s great video from 2007  (also check out an even earlier video w/ light saber ):

It would appear that this technology may be combining some wii-like sensors with image recognition that might be a descendent of the eyetoy. On initial inspection, it may not appear quite as distinctive as Microsoft’s Natal, but it looks to have some amazing specs and the speed and precision are exceptionally good. I will hazard a bet that Sony has learned some useful things from eyeToy and is going to hit the mark with this one.

All in all,  both these introductions point to a very exciting future for gaming interfaces that will blur the lines between digital worlds and physical reality even further. They will be blazing a trail for new forms of augmented reality in games that are sure to make useful contributions to other industries as well. Watch for some exciting developments in this space.

Yet, what bothers me about is that these sites completely undo one of the best features of the web, a publicly available address owned by the content provider. The problem is that what used to be an open public resource now falls into private hands. If  any one of — tinyurl.com, is.gd, short.ie, ow.ly, tri.im, or kl.am (or numerous others) fail — then they will bring down tens of thousands of URLs down with them.

It’s a no win situation because either these services have two choices:

 1) Operate these services as a public good, funding them out of their own kindness

 2) Figure out a business model that makes sense

In the first case, we have to ask whether that generosity might someday end, and even if it doesn’t – whether the lack of funding might one day cause the link service to fail anyway. In the second case, once we have a for-profit business model, suddenly we have for-profit proprietary extensions to the web itself. For example, some sites like ow.ly have an option to put the underlying page in a frame where you never get to see the original URL in the address bar at all. Now, that’s handy for retweeting, rating the site (and yes, the full address is still available via clicking if you want it), or sharing with others – but turning a public address into a private index that takes over the web’s basic interface seems to run counter to the Internet’s open beginnings.  It reminds me a bit of stumbleupon.com for example, useful, but ultimately shielding us from the open structure of the web by hiding its addresses.

Maybe I’m overreacting, and this is a little like people clinging to the old command line interfaces over a GUI, or perhaps insisting that the headers of email remain visible. In both those cases, most of us manage to get along just fine without a connection to the stuff that’s “under the hood”.  But does moving the structure of the web itself “under the hood” start to cross a new line? Are we in danger of losing the Internet’s open beginnings?

Part of what makes it such a wonderful resource is the fact that content owners (not distribution channels) allow a direct line of communication with end users. Search engines certainly preserve that connection. But URL shortening seems to be more of a slippery slope – one that could ultimately disintermediate web pages themselves.  Thoughts?

What I liked most about the book was the clever variety of well thought out characters and scenarios. How would people, companies, and institutions fare if plunged into a full scale zombie war – an unusual question, but one that the book tackles with great relish.  Interestingly, one of the scenarios described in the book gave me a new insight into wikinomics (see other wikinomics zombie mentions here, here, and here).  [if you plan to read the book, stop here, minor spoiler ahead] 

There’s one event described early in the zombie wars which pits America’s military might and technology against an invading army of mindless zombies. The book does a great job of describing a modern battlefield technology which allows combatants in the field to communicate and exchange information with one another (including live video transmitted by others). The description got me thinking… wow, great stuff, wikinomics, distributed collaboration, and collective intelligence in action. Cool.  Sure enough, I was duped. It turned out (in this fictional case at least) that this advanced battlefield technology contributed to the mighty army’s defeat. Instead of spreading intelligence and coordinating responses across the troops, it helped spread panic. Frightening visuals of defeat and voiced fears were instantly shared with everyone… and the result was a frightened mob, not orderly action from soldiers. In the end, the higher ups had to turn off the video feeds and try to reassure people that all was well (and by that time it was not).   

The lesson for me is that succeeding with wikinomics takes much more than just simply connecting people. A crowd can be “smart”, or it can be a mindless mob too. While James Surowiecki wrote about “The Wisdom of Crowds,” in 2004, I highly recommend Charles Mackay’s counterpoint written in 1841 called “Extraordinary Popular Delusions and the Madness of Crowds.” Crowds, even when highly connected via digital technology, do not automatically become smarter. In fact, as Mackay observed, sometimes they become mad and delusional too.  The difference is less about the process of magically connecting people, but more about the architecture for connecting them. HOW people are connected, seems to make the difference between  wisdom and madness… call it appropriate collaborative architecture. At the moment, finding the right collaborative architecture appears as much art as it is science, but we have lots of examples (and smart community builders) to point the way. Perhaps readers of this blog can share their own insights into these principles.

In a nutshell: power-hungry video games are run on a server far away, and then high-definition video of gameplay is piped over the internet back to the person playing the game. What that means is that games like Crysis (which are virtually unplayable on anything but a high-power PC) can be enjoyed on a low power laptop… or even piped directly to a TV with the help of a small box that can do the video decompression.

…think of it as inserting the Internet between a computer’s video output plug and the computer screen. Here’s their trailer/demo video:

The enemy of such a system is “lag” of course – any small delay induced in the video compression/decompression or via Internet transmission will kill first person shooter experiences. These are people that like 60 frames per second after all. But OnLive says it can combat that via the fastest video compression I’ve ever heard of (single digit milliseconds). To be honest, that’ sounds too low to believable – I don’t think Cisco’s telepresence system approaches that.  But if it really is anywhere close to that good, they’ve accomplished something spectacular.

It’s really interesting how most Internet-delivered multiplayer games start from the premise that you have lots of smart hardware and a narrow pipe. A lot of computing power goes into contructing and rendering physics and virtuals worlds that come out of those pipes. Onlive’s disruptive approach assumes the opposite. It assumes “dumb” hardware at the other end, but a fat pipe. That way it transmits a ton of “dumb” video pixels that can be displayed anywhere.  That’s not entirely the case of course, since there’s gotta be a ton of “smart” work going in in that video compression/decompression hardware, but it does give pause on how much smarts we really need at the edge of the cloud. It’s great to see OnLive take a stab at delivering games on demand – it creates interesting possibilities for controling piracy, try-before-buy, or even delivering a new breed of high-res games that even the highest end machines are incapable of.

But this is the tip of the iceberg when it comes to the larger possibilities for delivering cloud computing.  Games are just the beginning, the same model of delivery can be applied to anything that hits a computer screen. Regardless of whether OnLive itself succeeds, this is definitely an important turning point in our computing model.

So what did they do? They took matters into their own hands and auctioned the funds to the highest bidders -  other municipalities who had projects ready to go paid them cash for the rights to the MTA funds (in one case just $.61 on the dollar). The city selling the MTA funds would then be able to take the cash and use it for anything it liked.

Three interesting things about the situation stand out:

• First, the swaps/marketplace itself is quite innovative/creative. An interesting case in optimizing results in a grass roots way. Grade: A-
• Second, the low prices paid for the funds suggest that, in some cases, stimulus dollars are being weilded very inefficiently  (A $.61 price suggests a 39% inefficiency) Grade: C
• Third, the MTA appears to have put the brakes on these swaps. Maybe because of the publicity they generated? Who knows. But cities must now build (invent?) a case for their use, or risk losing them altogether. This seems to create the wrong message and set of incentives. Grade: D 

… please please let me buy something from you!   I hit the “buy” button, logged in, agreed to the terms, and: 

I like the idea, a lot. However, I think it’s a bit early to bet on one horse – so why not add more to the mix. I like twitter’s generally open approach, so why can’t they play in this space.

So, here’s a proposal on how anyone can use twitter as an open authentication scheme to log into their site:

The first step is a login page (screenshot below) which gives you a unique one-time authentication key that is used to identify your session. In this example the one-time code is “82kjx_OneTimeAccessCode_IeZh9els” and it is designed to be tweeted (probably best to DM) to the web site owner’s account (“SiteTwitterName”in this case). By DM’ing the one-time code to the site owner you link your session to a specific twitter account, and by DM’ing it, you provide proof that you own that twitter account. To make this easier to tweet, you could add a “copy to clipboard link”, or “tweet to login” button/link which would automatically prepopulate the tweet in a browser window (see next screenshot).

Below is a sample of what the page might look like after you click the “tweet this to login” button.  You can imagine the button creating a popup window like this (if the browser allows popup windows). On twitter, it’s easy to prepopulate a page with a ready-to-tweet message like this. Just open a page with the URL:

http://twitter.com/home/?status=d%20SiteTwitterName%2082kjx_OneTimeAccessCode_leZh9els

And that link should give you a page similar to the one below:

Then, once you send the DM through twitter. The website can use the twitter API to read the DM and then make a connection between your twitter ID and the unique session key in order to authenticate you. At that point, your original login page can be refreshed, logging you in automatically. Voila, you are logged into a website using your twitterID as the account name:

A login scheme like this would work with twitter, but equally well with any messaging or IM service that’s sufficiently quick and also has an API. One of the best things about it is that it doesn’t require any endorsement of the service provider in order to use it for authentication either. You can even imagine doing this via a mobile phone too (either through cameraphone image, QR code (discussed here and here), IVR, OCR, or even a “sound” produced by the website that you could hold your phone up to).

Any suggestions about holes or problems with this scheme that I may be missing? Or ideas for improvements?

If anyone would like to implement the first working demo of this scheme it would be a great contribution to the public good.  I’d love to credit you with it here. Happy to share any demo code for it too if you wish.

…please contact me via twitter @crasheral if you would like to help kickstart this.

Three minutes earlier than that, @manolantern sent out what appears to be the first tweet on the plane crash:

I just watched a plane crash into the hudson rive in manhattan

I love how our earliest news is most certainly going to contain typos from now on. Same case with Mike Wilson (@2drinksbehind) who in December twittered about being in a plane crash. Understandably he put it quite strongly:

Holy fucking shit I wasbjust in a plane crash!

I enjoyed his followup tweet just as much though:

You have your wits scared out of you, drag your butt out of a flaming ball of wreckage and you can’t even get a vodka-tonic. Boo

Twitter truly connects us to the experiences of others – and terrific first hand news is just part of the fun. While I hope there are no plane crashes in my future, you can follow my own twitter updates at @crasheral (gee, hope I’m not tempting fate with that twittername).

(From Pasta & Vinegar via flickr )

The Tuttuki bako (or “poking box”) is so strange that when I first heard of it I just had to order one and see it for myself. Technically, you might describe this as a finger-based augmented reality system. But to put it bluntly you stick your finger in the hole in the side of the box and prod a variety of virtual characters – sort of how you might play with ants or something. Here’s me dueling with a stick person (watch out it knows karate):

Here’s another version of the same game (photo below) where the stick person climbs aboard a seesaw. And yes, if you push your finger down hard enough it sends the stick figure flying up into the air).

In all, there’s roughly five different virtual characters you can interact with: stick people, an underwater scene with an octopus, a squishy blob (not sure how else to describe it), a human face you poke in the nose or eye (weird),  and a panda on a pendulum.  I’m not sure why, but battling the stick figure was hands down the most fun for me. It’s strange, but at first I felt a little guilty about shoving around this little stick person around, it even cowers in a corner sometimes. However, with a few retorts back, you soon find yourself happily waging war against your tiny opponent.

Another thing which got me interested in the Tuttuki bako in the first place was curiousity about the mechanics of this device. I suspected that it might have some mechanical moving parts, but that didn’t turn out to be the case at all. The inside of the box where you insert your finger is a more or less square empty space. To try and see what kind of sensors were at work, I tried using all kinds of finger substitutes such as a metal screwdriver, pens etc and all seemed to work more or less ok. Then I cut out a piece of construction paper into a finger shape and tried it instead, but the sensors didn’t detect it at all. I had to fold the paper making it much thicker before it was detected/recognized by the box. Very strange, I wondered what kinds of sensors these could possibly be.

My curiousity got the better of me, and I pretty much knew right from the start that I was going to have to crack this device open to have a better look at it. The first thing I worried about was the four little plugs which appeared to conceal the screw holes that held the entire box together: I was hoping I could pry them out, but preparing to drill them out if I had to.

I was quite pleased to discover that a sharp knife was sufficient to quite easily pry out all four of them. No drill required.

So once the plugs and screws were removed the device opened up quite easily. And as you can see below there’s an array of tiny sensors (9 on the right side and a single sensor on the left) that are used to detect finger positions.

The left side with the single sensor on it was more complex to take apart further since it is tangled up in the battery connections that run through the plastic housing. So I decided it’d be easier to remove the cover on the other side with the nine sensors instead and try to get a better look at what type of sensors these are. Here’s a closeup of the PCB with the sensors on top of it:

Each one of these sensors is labeled with an “IR” number (e.g. IR1 IR2 etc). So I can only assume that these are some kind of infrared detectors. I’ve seen the larger versions of infrared sensors in phidget form (see this earlier post), but never something so small.

Also, I’m still not sure why there are 9 of these on one side and only a single one on the other. I’m still assuming they are all IR – though perhaps the one on the other side is something else entirely?  I did briefly put the batteries back in while I had the device opened and it did seem to be able to detect my finger from the half with the 9 sensors only. However, with the other side missing of the sensor missing my finger didn’t have the same amount of reach that it did before when the box was fully enclosed. Nor could I “trick” it by putting a different finger in front of it while I moved my other finger in front of the arrays. So the role of the left sensor remains a bit of a mystery to me.

Has anyone seen IR sensors like this before or confirm that is indeed what these are? 

If after reading this you find yourself curious enough to order one, you can find them at ThinkGeek.com http://www.thinkgeek.com/geektoys/japanfan/ad59/  (update: sold out, anyone know another source?) which appears to be one of the few places on the planet that will deliver one in North America. It is every bit as strange a you might imagine. I highly recommend buying this inexpensive augmented reality device. An odd device that’s a conversation starter if nothing else.

This week, we’re renting out our upstairs apartment. So we placed a 1-week classified ad, as well as posting it in the for-rent section on craigslist. 

First some background – In the past, we’ve always had the best success with local newspaper ads. A few hundred dollars on an ad is a good deal when it means you don’t leave a suite empty for a month - classifieds were a great source of leads for the money. In contrast, we hadn’t had much luck with craigslist in the past, too few responses and no real qualified renters.

My, how times have changed. Our local newspaper advertising cost us $325 for a week of ads. Cost of our craigslist posting: zero, zip nada. Here’s how they compared:

Classifieds:
- Cost: $325
- Time before listing went live: 1.5 days
- Results (viewings): 2 viewings one late this week, one scheduled for next monday
- Results (completed applications): zero

Craigslist:
- Cost: free
- Time before listing went live: 5 minutes
- Results (viewings): 6 viewings scheduled within 24 hours (and one more later in the week)
- Results (applications): Three sets of completed applications

All I can say is: Craigslist, you are amazing, wow!

Control Lights with Twitter from Justin Wickett on Vimeo.

It appears (sample of 2-3 random articles) that these banner ads are now atop most of the entries in wikipedia.

On one hand I think it was rather noble of Wikipedia to refrain from commercial advertising on its site (because as Lawrence Lessig mentioned at a recent event of ours: commercial income might cause us to question motivations of contributors).

Yet on the other hand, I find it ironic that wikipedia’s “supported by donations” model has lead to banner ads on every page anyway. I’m guessing I’ll be flamed for saying it – but I say why not go the whole way. If we have banner ads on the top of every page, I suggest opening them to the highest bidder.

Done right, perhaps there is a way ads could actually keep wikipedia pure. Instead of hundreds of companies trying to quietly and subtly weave their agendas into wikipedia entries on the sly – why not give this commercial activity a proper and transparent place on each page and call it what it is – marketing!

The Dell Studio Hybrid was released last April, offering a desktop with a very different look/footprint. CNET was at best lukewarm in its review, saying:

It’s hard for us to recommend the Dell Studio Hybrid desktop for any practical purpose. As a desktop for productivity, you can get more bang-for-your-buck from a typical budget-priced midtower PC. And if your goal is either space-saving or using this system as a media PC, we’d instead point you to a similarly priced laptop, which has an integrated display, will perform most of the same functions, and is also portable.

However, that’s a criticism that could be easily levied at most Appple products too, they’re not competing on bang-for-buck or space savings, but on factors like brand, usability, and great design. It has been a few months since Dell released this. Does anyone have any word on how this product has stood up? Is this a smart and bold step by Dell to avoid PC commoditization (and foster a new design competency)? Or, is it a lame Apple wannabe attempt that produced a neat-looking product, albeit one which has no real target audience or following?

If PC manufacturers CAN produce cooler looking and more usable products, what design(s) would you like to see?

Anyway, that’s all to say that my expectations were pretty low when my HP power cord for my laptop ceased functioning yesterday. I called HP’s toll free number and was actually surprised that the person on the phone could instantly tell me (after giving them the serial number) exactly how long my machine was under warranty for and what parts it covered. They then confirmed the part at fault (the DC end of the cord) and said they’d send me a new one after taking down my email address.

Minutes later I received a confirmation of the entire transaction, then later in the day another email indicating the replacement had shipped (to be honest I wasn’t sure I believed that shipping message, having had a previous experience with Dell where the shipping notice gave me mixed messages). Anyway, the replacement did indeed ship – because this morning (less than 24hrs later) I have a working replacement power supply. It’s also convenient that they trust people enough to put the old/broken one back in the box and ship it with their return label (which I’ll do later today), instead of asking for the broken one first. Simply amazing. I was fully expecting to have to juggle power supplies with my colleagues all week.

Kudos to HP, seems like they’re doing a few things right (thanks for the link to this Ian).

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Toyota has also done some interesting robotics work with wheelchairs – producing a balancing wheelchair that’s similar in concept to the Segway personal transporter.

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A bit gimicky to be sure. Yet it’s also interesting to see how tomorrow’s assistive devices are certain to have a lot more intelligence embedded in them. That will enable these devices to be a lot more portable, practical, and (hopefully) safer and more user-friendly.

While musing about this dislike, it also struck me that paperwork itself is a legacy concept – with sufficiently advanced technology we shouldn’t actually need it. Why can’t every “event” set off a waterfall of transactions that satisfies the need for recordkeeping. Simply capture reality in electronic form and use that digital record to extract all the transactions, paperwork, and records you’d ever need. For example:

• No more filing taxes: a record of everything I earn and everything I spend means the government would “know” what I owe them. Maybe they could even deduct it on a per-transaction basis.
• No timesheets: if I’m working on my PC most of the day, why can’t it keep track of the ways I’m spending my time and what I’m working on better than my memory ever could. Maybe it could be tied to the electronic card I use to get in and out the door. Voila, no more timesheets.
• Cashier linueps: Wouldn’t it be nice to avoid the lineup at the till by simply taking what you want off the shelf and then walking it out the door of the store. They’ve got videocamera’s everywhere, so some quality machine vision ought to be able to keep track of your items plus a record of who you are (so they could bill it to you). And for those who don’t like lots of little receipts, a online itemized list of what you spent would be great too.
• Redundant courier paperwork: I recently shipped an overseas package and was dismayed to see that the courier’s label and the customs forms both contained requests for identical information. Maybe it’s asking too much, but it’d be great if information from one form got automatically used for the others… Maybe the  “sender” field I entered last time could be remembered automically too.
• Travel profiles: I think I’ve filled out nearly a dozen separate travel profiles in my working career so far. It’d be great to have a universal travel profile that could be generated once and then reused. If my credit history can be shared that way for the benefit of financial institutions, why can’t airlines share my travel profile for the benefit of me. (ok, I think I know why… but still, wouldn’t it be nice?)

Anyone else have paperwork pet peeves they’d like to see eliminated?

This is just the latest in a series of heavy handed moves (see my earlier post on “helicopter Bernanke”) to help bail out the economy. These firms are “too big to fail” and the government is really stepping in to help prevent the nightmare scenario of having all these mortgage backed securities hitting the market – which would spur a meltdown of its own. Preventing them from hitting the market is “all that matters” says Scott Bleier, of CreateCapital.com. Some have put an estimate of 5% writedowns on this mortgage portfolio, but the truth is that no one really knows that the true figure is, and we’re unlikely to find out any time soon.

Tough times call for tough measures to be sure, but in addition to reaching for whatever band-aid solutions we can find to the problem – we also need to examine the actions we can take today which will help ensure we never put ourselves in this tough spot again. Trying to quietly wind down these problems doesn’t help us understand what went wrong and ensure we won’t do it again someday.

Untangling the vast tangled mess of connected neurons in the brain is a huge challenge. So researchers Edward M. Callaway and John Young found a way to control the spread of rabies one neuron at a time in order to analyze how these neurons connect. In thie long term, efforts like these promise to unlock the mysteries of the brain.

That might also have implications for mass collaboration. People like CoreMedia’s Sören Stamer describe the similarities between networks of connected individuals and the brain itself. Microblogging between users almost acts like firing amongst the synapses. It wouldn’t be surprising if the same rules that govern the effective relationships amongst our neurons also turn out to have implications for how we ought to structure our own information sharing relationships in organizations.

Why not cultivate and harness the emergent intelligence from these highly connected networks of individuals? Without social media tools, the synapses of many organizations may not be firing at all.

This helps centralize some of the other “hack Ikea” product efforts. These nifty 360 degree speakers made out of Ikea salad bowls (how-to instructions found at Instructables.com) are one of my personal favorites:

Has anyone done some Ikea “hacks” of their own that they’d like to share here?

Early this morning I did a check of my webmail and found a message supposedly from support@mydomain.com with the subject heading “Registration renewal for your domains”. While I didn’t have any domains there, I didn’t think much of it until I clicked to open the message.

Immediately, out of the blue it appeared to log me out of hotmail and present me with a new hotmail login screen. The font looked a little odd, so I checked the URL in the browser (which showed me all was well and that I was on:  http://…mail.live.com/  However, when I right clicked to get the properties for the page I found that the actual site I was on was:

   http://…mail.live.com.kbs8.cn   

   (note:  I don’t suggest going to the kbs8.cn site, no telling what’s there)

Anyway, I emailed hotmail security about it. I’m curious to see what they’ll tell me. This seems to be a pretty serious security bug though. Not sure how an email can take over the entire hotmail interface leaving the main URL intact but presenting with an arbitrary web page.

The only other explanation that I can imagine for this is if microsoft runs the kbs8.cn site itself. However, I’m not going there to find out. And if they do own it, it’s probably not a good choice of URL to frame in a login page. I’m glad I didn’t log back in again when I was mysteriously logged out. But with scams like these, it’s getting much harder than it used to be to know when you’re being phished or not.

I’ll report back with any news I receive from hotmail’s security staff in case they have advice on browser settings or how to avoid this security issue. UPDATE: response from Microsoft is that they’re looking into it and a report was made to their passport group about the issue. They have since followed up saying the phishing site will be taken down shortly.

Have you ever been taken in by a phishing scheme before? How did you know? What did you do?

Any experts have recommendations or best practices on how to avoid these risks?

China is one of the countries pushing the environmental frontier in this case. The country has standardized cell phone adapters on USB power according to this article, a simple but terrific idea.

the government has regulated that all cell phone chargers, including those imported, have a standard USB interface and output voltage, so consumers don’t need a new one with every new phone.

That just makes sense.

How many different power adapters do you own?    If I include obsolete ones in my basement, I’m guessing I have well over a dozen… anyone else?  How many cords would you replace if you had a universal power adapter?

For other tiny web servers, check here and here.

 “the traditional scarf of Arab men that has come to symbolize murderous Palestinian jihad.”

Dunkin’ Donuts bowed to the pressure, saying:

‘‘In a recent online ad, Rachael Ray is wearing a black-and-white silk scarf with a paisley design. It was selected by her stylist for the advertising shoot. Absolutely no symbolism was intended. However, given the possibility of misperception, we are no longer using the commercial.’’

I think it’s unfortunate that a traditional article of clothing worn by millions (also incidentally, by Lawrence of Arabia, and by the British SAS too – though  the latter call refer to it as shemaghs) is the cause of such a fuss. It’s ludicrous to draw links between Ray or Dunkin’ Donuts and the support of terrorism because of an article of clothing. We shouldn’t support extremsim of any kind – which I think also extends to include overreactions like this which would judge or label someone based on their wardrobe. What the world needs is more tolerance, not reactions and  judgements about huge segments of the earth’s population.

A better response by Dunkin’ Donuts would have been to move in the opposite direction. To ensure that no single political message was being sent, they might have done well to feature  adornments or clothing from a variety of cultures in their ads.