FeedMe

Password Evil

Pet peeve: Idiotic rules placed on passwords. Current example: brightidea.com.

"Password must contain at least one upper case character"

"Password must contain at least one symbol (!#$%&()*+,-/[email protected]{|}~)"

They make it maximally irritating by not telling you these rules until you violate them. So you type a password. Twice, of course.

They balk and you type a new one. Twice.

They balk again. You have typed the damn thing six times now.

Oh, wait, the rules are there. There are five rules!! Gray on gray -- way over to the right, not near where you enter passwords and only when you click on the password box:

And it even contains a typo.

This is not the stupidest. That award goes to the morons in IT at Blue Cross/Blue Shield of Texas for the restriction that no password can contain the first three letters of any month!

IT people everywhere, please: We know you were the smallest one the playground and you never got your way. We know you like being in control. But your customers have hundreds of passwords and why should they need to have a separate Post-It with your site's password just because you think you're wiser than any banking or securities site and you have such smart rules for how to make a "stong" password.

Stop being an idiot.

Knol

New from Google is the "Knol." Interesting idea. They've made it extremely easy for anyone to write an article on anything. For instance, I posted an article on how to make lemon sorbet (the same article appears here, in the FeedMe blog).

Google's company mission is to "organize the world's information and make it universally accessible and useful." They have noted that the entire Internet contains a fraction of a percent of the world's knowledge. The vast majority is in people's heads. (Yahoo has talked about the same idea.) This is a way to soak up some of what's in our brains.

A lot of press on Knol is calling it a Wikipedia competitor but frankly, I think they are missing the point. Unlike Wikipedia, Knol is not collaborative: only the author controls the content. They have very few rules or editorial controls. There are no rules requiring a neutral point of view or restricting conflict of interest. Multiple articles on the same topic can be posted. They are trusting that their search product will properly prioritize all this, along with the rest of the web.

This seems like a significant marketing opportunity. Is there a "first-in" advantage? Should we rush in to write about technical topics that benefit our companies, with links to our company websites?

Not sure, but for now, I am sharing my sorbet recipe.

(You can see all my articles -- just three so far -- by starting at my own knol page.)

(P.S. The knol system is a bit buggy. It sometimes won't load and with Firefox, it is currently not letting me sign in, though it works with Safari. Earlier today, it worked with Firefox. Its search is presently not finding any of my articles, even though they are in the system. I expect it will settle down over the next few days. Google has a motto: "Release early and often." Good think Boeing doesn't follow that philosophy.)

Internet Marketing Job -- for Obama!

As an Internet marketer, I see jobs fly by. Here's an interesting one. Interesting to me because -- well, what a cool job. But also interesting to see the listing and the requirements. This is more sophisticated than I'd vave expected in the world of politics.

They're looking for "Internet experts" in search engine marketing, search engine optimization, online media planning, Internet display ad buying, ad optimization analytics, DART ad server, brand advertising, etc.

I wonder if all the candidates are up to speed on how to use the Internet.

Stupidest Password Restriction

One of my pet peeves is stupid login or password restrictions. What it means is that for this login only, I have to use a different password. Some require you include numbers, some require numbers be between letters...

The stupidest one ever came up today. Blue Cross / Blue Shield requires:

Your password cannot contain the first three letters of a month (for example: Jan, Feb, Mar). Please try again. Thank you.                             

WHAT?

So if your password is Janet32puppy or imamartian, you're hosed?

Morons.

End rant.

Quote

This would be funny if it weren't so true.

"Email combines intimacy and distance in a way that sociopaths seem to really enjoy."
— Merlin Mann

Opt Out the Easy Way

I've started to opt-out of all the mail I receive, both electronic and paper. It's important — not only do these offers waste resources and your time, many open up opportunities for identity theft.

It's a pain to do opt-out one-by-one but happily, there are ways to do it en masse. You can register with organizations (almost always for free) whose members have committed to remove anyone who requests it. They include mail order companies who will stop sending catalogs; credit companies who will stop sending offers; anti-spam lists; and telemarketers.

Even better, all of these services have been gathered in one place. Visit the World Privacy Forum's Top Ten Opt-Outs. Just march down the list and follow the directions. 

One of the most important mailings to dodge are the ones that offer you pre-approved credit. If a bad guy were to intercept one of these from your mailbox, he could sign up for a credit card and if he watched for the response, he could run off with the new card and use it for at least a month. Before you even knew the card existed, your credit history would be a mess. The Pre-Screened Offers Opt-Out (number two on the top-ten opt-out site) is an important one to visit.

Once you have signed up, wait a couple of months and begin manually removing yourself from whatever remains.

And when you sign up for new things in the future, be careful to check (or uncheck) the privacy boxes. But be careful: Some of them are tricky.

Health Records Online: A Matter of Trust

A new online service, HealthVault.com, provides a single, web-accessible repository for all your health records. There is much here to like, but — there are a lot of buts.

It has always bothered me that every new doctor or medical service asks the same questions, and each with a separate form. Dentist, specialists, emergency clinics, labs, pharmacies — same questions, again and again. What drugs are you taking? Which of these diseases have you had? Family medical history. It's inconvenient but more important, it compromises one's health care: I'll bet I have answered these 100 times and there are certainly differences, either because things have changed or I don't remember every detail.

This can be important information: A doctor's diagnosis and treatment depend on what the doctor knows about you. And in an urgent situation, or when the patient is not lucid, having accessible medical records can be life and death. I really want better online medical records.

As a technologist, it makes me especially crazy. Everyone else, from the DMV to the grocery store, has an online record system that is better than the medical community's. There are legitimate issues but nothing that can't be solved — and that have already been solved. Every medical office can readily access my credit information already. Clearly we can solve the privacy and networking and access issues.

Some worry about the security issue: Having all your medical data in some centralized database worries people. But do you really think your privacy is more guarded when there are 25 uncontrolled, unencrypted copies of your records, in 25 medical offices all over the county, immediately readable by 100 office staff?

Along comes HealthVault. It's a good start. It keeps all the information for you and your family under what looks like tight security. It holds contact and profile information, medical records, etc. You can upload image files and documents. The sharing facilities seem robust — you can invite someone to view the information and choose what they may see.

Two issues are access and trust. In terms of access, will my doctors accept a HealthVault login as a substitute for their form? Not yet, but they have a few partners who are using the date.

The bigger issue is trust. Note that I did not say "security" — that's a technical issue. It's the human issue of trust that will make or break this, and other, medical automation solutions.

HealthVault is owned by Microsoft. Do you trust Microsoft? I don't share the common distrust of of their corporate intent — I think they mean well and their corporate ethos is that technology is powerful medicine to help people. They also believe that profit and benefit go hand in hand. So I trust their intent.

I am not sure if I trust their technology. They're competent technologists. They certainly are capable of making an accessible, trustworthy, secure system. But will they?

Every Microsoft product is full of defects. Even after years of refinement, glitches remain — sometimes the same issues for year after year.

I worry about bloat. Huge applications mean more opportunity for bugs and functional flaws and Microsoft often seems to not know how to say no to a feature. Worse, they keep adding rather than fixing — a palette, an assistant, a wizard, a "ribbon" — layer upon layer of new things to repair incomprehensible interfaces only a programmer could have designed.

This all affects usability. I am always in awe of what they spend on usability testing and redesign. They seem incapable of simplicity. The continuous repair tells me they know there is a problem but don't know how they are causing it.

Then there are the bugs. I registered and in the process discovered four bugs. Some were cosmetic or minor functional issues, such as a spray of Javascript across the top of one page. There were many user interface oddities. Right now, it logged me out and won't let me log in. Most people at this point would give up. I went in through the top of the application and found a screen that let me sign in.

I tried to edit my contact information. There is no link to let me do that. I think I know why. I haven't confirmed my identity by replying to the e-mail, but guess what: It's not telling me that. There is no Edit link and they give the user no clue. It's programmer-think: If a capability is not available, don't show it. Would Apple or Amazon or Yahoo have done this?

So, will I use this? Even without my doctors' buy-in, there is enough functionality for me to get started. But that's mostly because I am a tech geek. Others would not likely try this, yet.

And then there is the trust issue.

I expect that the underlying security is fine. But it's like the president of United Airlines once said, "If the tray tables are dirty, the customer has to be wondering about the condition of the engines." As much as I may want this service, I am not going to be uploading my data, given how dirty their tray tables are.

Do You Think You Know What Google's Business Is?

Phil Bronstein, owner of the San Francisco Chronicle, talked about the changing business model for newspapers. He doesn't know where it's going! He admits that! They are seeing more online traffic but they have little idea how to make that work commercially. People love their news on paper but how does one turn that into income?

In 1999, the Internetters were operating on a fantasy: "If you build it, they will come." They thought that attracting "eyeballs" would somehow result in massive revenue. An audience of millions has to be worth something. But an audience of people who are seeking free stuff is notoriously fickle. When the 'net squad and their venture capitalists scrambled to "monetize" their eyeballs, to use the stomach-truning hip-speak of the Internet boom years, it was only a matter of time before it all came crashing apart.

Well, here's the kicker: With Google's AdSense, that Internet fantasy became real.

Today, I can build almost anything, appealing to any splinter, enthusiast audience, and use Google's ad products to create a cash stream. Anyone want to see my left-handed singing chihuahua website? (OK, almost anything.)

Google has four product lines. Five, in a way.

One is the search engine. That's the engine that drives the rest.

Second is AdWords -- the ads that appear on the search engine results page.

Those are the products everyone knows.

The third is AdSense -- ads they syndicate by placing them on content pages anywhere. Google makes the ads match the page where they appear -- targeted ads, the most profitable kind. And generally, placed close to time of purchase. The cherriest cherry in the ad world.

The fourth is Google-built content. That's why they want to digitize libraries, map the planet, fund your e-mail and discussion groups and usenet. All that content is bait for AdSense.

A fifth product is their internal brilliance -- the environment that fuels one of the highest-output creativity machines in the history of the planet. (This is the product line that scares me. I wonder if they can control it. Will they be able to say no to their engineers when they give each of them 20% of the week to develop anything they please?)

Google gets it. A tiny, tiny percentage of the world gets Google.

Geek Peek from the Past, continued

I had a few friends who replied regarding this article. Thought I would add their two cents here.

> Linda: This is great...ah, the simpler times. I particularly like the ad just below
> yours: Help to care for Fancy Show Poultry. Must like chickens.
>
> I also love the 3 bedroom ranch house (with paneled walls!!!!) for $125/mo.

I loved the "must like chickens" line. There were a lot of chicken farms in the area -- and my Dad had one of them. My brothers and I got to collect eggs after school each day and tend to other chicken-generated organic products.

By the way, that phrase, "running around like a chicken with its head cut off" is true. Not so much running, really, but moving around in all directions -- ok, guess that is more than you city slickers wanted to know.

Two friends asked about the church notices. "I guess all the listings about Temple activities are on another page, huh?" said one. Especially noteworthy since they know I'm Jewish. Well, in Neversink and Grahamsville, there were maybe three Jewish families. No black families and very few of any other non-European ethnicity.

This took one friend by surprise, given that this is the Catskills, which he thought had a zillion Jews. Which is true -- but only in the summer, when a third of the population of New York City came up to either vacation in the Catskills or to work in the resorts. There were regular Jewish residents but most were in the towns -- Liberty, Monticello, Middletown. Towns without sidewalks and street lights were pretty WASPy.

Geek Peek from the Past

This is interesting on several levels. To me, at least.

In 1968, I was almost 16 and already a major nerd.

I think it was my mother's idea that I place a classified ad in the local newspaper. Now, you need to understand what "local" and "newspaper" mean in this case. "Local" was a small, rural community in Sullivan County in upstate New York. We had under 1000 kids in the local school -- and that's K-12. The "newspaper" was weekly, 8 pages, and mimeographed (if you even remember what that was -- it was before photocopiers, let alone inkjet).

The ad asked people to donate their dead electronics (think vacuum tubes, folks) gear (meaning TVs and radios, pretty much).

The interesting thing is that in this tiny farm community, people responded and I soon had 25 or 30 television sets. A couple of them still worked. I got one or two more to work and the rest became parts.

What I find interesting is this. First, the blast from the past and this little glimpse into small town, 1968. Second, the memory of how people responded to an opportunity to help some geeky kid. And third is a sales and marketing lesson, that it works to ask for what you want in an unusual way that captures people's interest. 

The fourth point was how this clipping came to me: The miracle of the Internet. On this, the downside of the Internet "bubble," maybe a lot of us forget that the Internet was and is a transformation in how people reach people. In this case, a guy named Keith Carlsen, a classmate of my baby brother's, began finding and contacting people from the area. He found me via the Internet and has been sending me scanned material from class yearbooks and such. He e-mailed me this clipping.

Sometimes, when we siliconheads get caught up in the technology, it is good to remember that in its shining moments, technology is about people.

This is the full back page of the August 14, 1968 Townsman.