Private Conversations

Over the last 20 years, people have adapted to conversing online. You can send messages to anybody anywhere and anytime, and they in turn can message back in real time or when they are free. With the Covid-19 outbreak this has become even more common. Distributed families in even in the same cities haven't seen each other for months, and instead use web and mobile applications to keep in touch.

There has been one aspect that has been continuously evolving - security. Initially the internet was designed as an open protocol, made more for sharing and referencing information, rather than locking it down. However as people's digital signature became larger and they share more details about themselves, the aspect of control has been evolving. Some of the early internet companies (yes I'm considering you - Google and Facebook) based their entire business model on ads with the exploitation of individual data, thus distorting the ethical fabric of the internet. As I wrote in a previous blog 7 years ago, any centralised accumulation of user data becomes a target for other agencies, mostly unethical. 

Notably, companies like Apple have realised this and pivoted towards enabling individual control of their data. It probably helps that their business model does not depend on selling your data. There are many aspects to modern tech usage that need to be re-engineered towards a more private and secure model. 

In the end, if you were to whisper something into someone's ear, you don't intend that to be available openly on the internet - forever. Digital reputations are something not easily reset.

What brings me back to this topic, is a WhatsApp application terms-of-reference update that stipulates that users are now required to share their data with the parent company Facebook. If one has been following Facebook over the years, then one can see they originate from a hacker mentality and culture - "better to seek forgiveness later, than ask permission". Thus their aim has been to exploit all data at their disposal to advance themselves competitively and financially, at the expense of a moral compass. It is funny to see former employees of Facebook, now becoming older, coming out and being apologetic and advising caution in using Facebook. On the other hand online users have been happy to give away their privacy in exchange for ease of use and dopamine driven programming. 

Starting in Feb, WhatsApp will begin sharing all kinds of data with Facebook. They just killed their best feature - privacy.

Please no longer text me on WhatsApp. Download @signalapp

— Chamath Palihapitiya (@chamath) January 10, 2021

WhatsApp's founders intended for it to be an ad-free completely privacy-driven messaging service. Most of us in Information Tech sector knew that was over once Facebook bought WhatsApp. Somehow WhatsApp's founders fooled themselves that their original intentions for the application would be maintained. I'm sure the enormous pay-out they received helped cement the illusion.

In my globally distributed family, we have been big users of WhatsApp, but now I'm advocating for everyone to shift to something else. It can be hard to do. Not everyone is tech-savvy, and once they have overcome the learning curve of one application, most are reluctant to switch.

There are more evolved privacy-conscious messenger candidates out there. The one I'm switching to at the moment and advocating is Signal. It cannot be purchased by another big player. It is secure, open-source, and end-to-end encrypted. It is also endorsed by most of the smart players - Edward Snowden, Jack Dorsey, Elon Musk among others. A more detailed look is provided in the following video:

Here's how to set it up on Android:

And how to set it up on Apple:

*      *      *

DIY nano-SIM to regular size SIM adapter

Stuck with a smaller-SIM card and have to switch to a phone which uses the larger (normal) version? 

Like a lot of people I recently put in an order for a new iPhone which are several weeks away from delivery, and in simultaneously managed to sell the existing older-generation iPhone. What to use in the meantime? I fished out an older Android phone from one of the storage drawers, but had an issue - it uses a ‘normal’ regular size SIM card. The size difference is shown below.

There were two options. First, to purchase a commercially available adapter as in image below.

Or second, perhaps much more fun and challenging - make my own. I took on the challenge, as I didn’t have the time to wait for a purchased version to come in.

The following ingredients were required:

1. Correct measurements template for each of the SIMs - 
• take a PDF printout from the helpful folks at nanosim-adapter.com 
2. A material of the same thickness as a SIM card to make the adaptor
• some thick card - example: discarded garment labels, or in my case, a sock pack cover.
3. Tools 
• scissors, basic sellotape, a little glue

Steps:

1. Take a printout of the earlier mentioned PDF sheet (A4 size). Make sure that in the print preferences, you do not scale down the document, or fit-to-page, or fit-to-margins.
2. Cut out the full SIM shape on the page, and 
   
3. Glue it to a suitable card material (For me it was a sock packet :) . Make sure to use very little, minimum glue. You don’t want it leaking into your phone. 
   
   
   
   
4. Cut the card to the regular SIM shape
   
5. Carefully cut out the hole for the nano-SIM, 
   
6. Make sure the actual nano-SIM card fits into the hole on the card.
   
7. Flip the card template and nano-SIM together over on the non-contacts side, and put sellotape across the back. 
   
8. Trim down any extra card or sellotape.
9. Your nano-SIM adapter is ready 
10. Put into your phone to test it out. 
    

If you got it right, it should work as it did for me (see below)! Cost = $0. 

Cellphone using SIM adaptor showing full reception

Note: The website mentioned also offers options of converting a regular-SIM to nano/micro-SIM, which is probably a DIY destructive process. Also to convert micro-SIM to regular-SIM, which is similar to steps above.

Half Billion Fixed Line Broadband Netizens

A visual representation of the internet

A half a billion users will have their own fixed broadband subscriptions this year.

"Overall the number of net new fixed-broadband subscriptions grew in 2009 to over 480 million, largely as a result of accelerating growth in emerging markets and we expect this number to reach 500 million this year. China, Russia, Mexico, India and Vietnam were among the countries that recorded the greatest leaps in fixed-broadband subscription numbers last year,"

- comments Rob Gallagher, Principal Analyst at Informa Telecoms & Media and Lead Author of the Next 100 Million report.

Note that this does not include all the mobile net subscriptions that are poliferating or just dial-up accounts, so actual number of net users would be even greater.

Country-wise figures for fixed-broadband subscriptions at end-September 2009 are:

Rank	Country	Subscriptions
1	China	91,348,000
2	US	82,846,600
3	Japan	31,240,000
4	Germany	25,114,300
5	France	19,306,400
6	UK	18,033,300
7	Korea	16,238,262
8	Russia	12,356,100
9	Italy	12,116,350
10	Brazil	10,951,600
11	Spain	9,681,520
12	Canada	9,562,000
13	Mexico	8,771,100
14	India	7,653,460
15	Netherlands	6,274,000
16	Turkey	6,166,800
17	Australia	5,968,000
18	Poland	5,654,100
19	Taiwan	5,549,440
20	Argentina	3,543,800

What is a browser?

Living in our digital ivory towers, it is easy to forget how disconnected we technocrats are with the general public. Many of the concepts and jargon that comes naturally to us is just unintelligible to most. Here, Scott Suiter, a former Google intern explores if people know what a browser is ...

Google Operating System

This has been building up for some time. Google army of talented devleopers has been gradually pushing into areas of desktop computer applications. Google has Office suite - Google Docs, Browser - Chrome, Email - Gmail and I can keep going. In fact, I find that most of my computing requirements can now be covered by some form of Google service. As a software developer, I find that many of the online platforms and components are also being rethought and launched from Google. Now to support all this from your desktop/laptop is the first explicitly declared Google Operating System for personal computing (they already had Android OS for mobiles) - Google Chrome OS.

Google declares

.. So today, we're announcing a new project that's a natural extension of Google Chrome — the Google Chrome Operating System. It's our attempt to re-think what operating systems should be.

There's no rush, it won't be available for over a year from. In Apple-reminiscent marketing-style they are trying to capture mindspace. Microsoft's next OS Windows 7 is due to be launched this October. Both these companies know that the key to sustaining the size of their businesses depends on being able to position themselves as the portal to computing and online experience. Microsoft controls PCs, Google dominates the online experience - both are trying to extend their dominance into the other's arena as these are merging. So far, Google has been making inroads into Microsoft's turf, but not vice-versa. An interesting point from TechCruch:

Obviously, this Chrome OS will be lightweight and fast just like the browser itself. But also just like the browser, it will be open-sourced. Think Microsoft will be open-sourcing Windows anytime soon?

The free OS, OS based on the net, and netbooks are concepts that have been visited unsuccessfully before - the future direction is not a given. Final word from the Economist:

Yet it is much too early to count Microsoft out. It recently launched Bing, a new search service, which has taken some market share from Google. In October, roughly when Google will make Chrome OS available, Microsoft will release the next iteration of its operating system, Windows 7, a version of which is supposed to run well on netbooks. And the firm is spending billions on a “cloud”, a global network of huge data centres, which will rival Google’s infrastructure and allow Microsoft to offer all kinds of web-based applications.

Will there be a clear winner? Probably not in the foreseeable future. The pockets of both firms are simply too deep. And that is a good thing: the epic fight between the two giants promises to speed up innovation. And that is what the IT industry needs to overcome the recession.

A colleague also showed me a prescient cartoon from Frederico Fieni

Job satisfaction depends on how you use your hands

Come to think about it, that I first thing I enjoyed about computers was the power that came with pressing so many buttons - it sort of makes sense. As we all become 'knowledge workers', our focus is shifting to our internal mental processes. We may seek the cure to our stress in alternate mental states, where instead it is probably just doing something physical that reconnects us with reality.

An article from a Ph.D. knowledge worker turned motorcycle mechanic:

High-school shop-class programs were widely dismantled in the 1990s as educators prepared students to become “knowledge workers.” The imperative of the last 20 years to round up every warm body and send it to college, then to the cubicle, was tied to a vision of the future in which we somehow take leave of material reality and glide about in a pure information economy. This has not come to pass. To begin with, such work often feels more enervating than gliding. More fundamentally, now as ever, somebody has to actually do things: fix our cars, unclog our toilets, build our houses.

...

I once accidentally dropped a feeler gauge down into the crankcase of a Kawasaki Ninja that was practically brand new, while performing its first scheduled valve adjustment. I escaped a complete tear-down of the motor only through an operation that involved the use of a stethoscope, another pair of trusted hands and the sort of concentration we associate with a bomb squad. When finally I laid my fingers on that feeler gauge, I felt as if I had cheated death. I don’t remember ever feeling so alive as in the hours that followed.

More at
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/05/24/magazine/24labor-t.html?_r=2&pagewanted=all

Webstock '09

This is the conference I look forward to every year. A huge amount of thought and energy by come of the most creative people in New Zealand web community goes in organizing this event. Sponsored by a plethora of companies and institutions such as Google. A typical attribute of the gathering is the rather forward looking and upbeat atmosphere which is easy to catch.

This year we have speakers include people from Apple Inc., Google, and Flickr. The forum provides a good community where they can share their insights and battle-stories and the audience understand, sympathize and learn from these.

They've finally induced me into starting a twitter micro-blogging account. I'll be putting live twitter updates when I can here, and will add further Scio-sphere blogs for some of the sessions later.

Conference website: http://www.webstock.org.nz
Flickr photos: http://www.flickr.com/photos/tags/webstock/
My Twitter: http://twitter.com/apanand

Work from Home

These days with all the information at one's fingertips and devices that enable mobility, it's inevitable that the possibility of working from home arises. One normally pictures sitting in pyjamas at home tapping away on the work computer keyboard with the kids running around in the background.

When the idea was joked about in our office meeting, there were two groans - and both from guys married with kids. I was one of them. I find it hard to imagine how one can be serious about doing work surrounded by the distractions of domestic bliss.

However it seems one US company has implemented just that plan, potentially saving a lot of money.

Rick Boyd used to spend US$500 (NZ$648) a month on petrol and road tolls commuting between his home and office in New York state. Now Boyd doesn't commute any more because his company, Chorus, which provides clinical and management software for community health centres, has gone virtual.

Chorus closed its headquarters in Hasbrouck Heights, New York in early June and its other office, in Texas, a month later. Now all of the company's 35 employees and full-time consultants work at home. For the most part, they love it.

Chorus CIO Rick Boyd says existing technology made it easy for his company to go virtual.

Boyd says the company decided to close its offices to save money and spare employees the hassle and rising cost of commuting and because it had the necessary technology to support such a move. President and CEO AJ Schreiber says Chorus can continue to serve customers while simultaneously saving US$400,000 a year simply by closing its 15,000 square feet of office space.

There's a catch - the following constraints were implemented to make this work:

1. employee needs to have separate space in home, separated from rest of house and denizens. (Sorry no TV)
2. employee needs to have work desk
3. employee needs to be on desk during work hours, odd hours not allowed
4. employees provided with computing and telecommunications equipment - laptops, monitors, keyboards, headsets, internet service, IP Communicators, Blackberry/Windows smartphones
5. employee can buy office supplies (Paper, Ink, Post It notes etc.) and bill it to company
6. right infrastructure, with backup plans in case something goes down

So in other words - you take your office cubicle and put it at home - no escape, really.

Read more in the Computerworld article.

200,000 books, one Geek with his computers

A very interesting New York Times article covers what is effectively a stupendous mockery of the process of creating a book. But books are produced nevertheless, and some people buy them.

The infinite monkey theorem states that a monkey hitting keys at random on a typewriter keyboard for an infinite amount of time will almost surely type a particular chosen text, such as the complete works of William Shakespeare.  - Infinite monkey theorem, Wikipedia

Humans cannot deal with infinity, but we can use better assistants than monkeys to reduce the time it takes. In the Information age, Philip M. Parker, has put his name to 200,000 books setting records for being a prolific author. The catch to this inhuman behaviour is an array of assistant computers programmed to fetch information online on any particular topic and compile them into a book. He explains the process in the following video.



It's unnerving to think that this process can be extended to other media like games, audio and video as well. Effectively it establishes the precedent that a person is not required to compile content into human consumption media items like books or movies.

At the library end, I wonder what this implies for cataloguers. It doesn't make sense for humans to be organizing output that comes from machines. Do cataloguers they have to be human too, or can they just be machines instantly summarizing and deriving overviews from the content?

I found some of these books here on Amazon.

The New York Times article can be found here.

Code Poets, Software Engineers

The following article by Jonathan Wise has been resonating online with the Software community. A lot that has been written applies to me and my colleagues everywhere. Our job titles are perhaps deliberately confusing enough to keep you guessing our 'real' work. The following excerpts highlight the best and easiest bits, but you can read the full article here to get the complete description.

• And believe it or not, I don't fix computers for a living.
• There's these organizations, some (not all) still stuck in the 70s and 80s, called “I.T. Departments” who's official purpose is to fix computers — but who's actual purpose is to attempt to prevent their users from doing anything dangerous (read: useful.)
• A software developer must be part writer and poet, part salesperson and public speaker, part artist and designer, and always equal parts logic and empathy.
• A piece of software starts, before any code is written, as an idea or as a problem to be solved.
  
• It is always tied to a human being — their job, their entertainment… their needs.
• Once you understand what you need to build, you still don't begin building it. Like an architect or a designer, you start with a sketch, and you create a design.
• Its not uncommon for the design process to take longer than the coding process.
• You put on a sales hat and you pitch what you've dreamt up… then wait with bated breath while they dissect your brain child.
• Software that can't be understood can't be used, so no matter how brilliant your design, if your interface isn't elegant and beautiful and intuitive, your project is a failure.
• To make something easy to use requires at least a basic understanding of human reactions, an awareness of cognitive norms.
• Only, unlike a salesperson selling someone else's product, you are selling your own work, and are inevitably emotionally-attached to it.
• Maybe its more like music ...
• ... the pieces are added up, each in itself a little work of art, they make, if programmed properly, a whole that is much more than a sum. Its is an intertwined, and constantly moving piece of art.
• ... next comes a Quality Assurance Engineer (or QA) who tries to break your code, question your decisions, and generally force you to do better than what you thought was your best.
• it takes a true artist, or at least an earnest student, to understand just how brilliant — or how wretched — the work behind it is.
• As a lead developer on a project, it falls to you to instill confidence, to speak articulately and passionately about the appropriateness and worth of your solution.
• ... user's are never really satisfied. So you think back to the design process, you remind them when they had a part in the decisions ...
• And you write and you teach. ... responsibility to educate people on the uses of our technology ...
• Then there's a party, a brief respite, where you celebrate your victory ... And you start again. ...
  
• ... you are only as good as your latest victory.
  

New way to resize images automatically

At the SIGGRAPH 2007 conference, in the session named Image Slicing and Stretching there has been a notable technology presented by two researchers from Mitsubishi Electric Research Laboratories (MERL).

Called Seam Carving for Content-Aware Image Resizing, it's described as

Seam carving is a method for content-aware resizing that changes the size of an image according to its content. This paper shows applications to aspect-ratio change, image retargeting, and object removal.

Resizing images to make them fit in the required internet form factor without distorting its contents has always been a bit of a challenge. The demonstration of this tool, seems to make the work involved a lot easier and automated. The ability of a page to resize with the browser window is called liquidity. Here the images in the page also support that concept.

It also demonstrates the capability of locating areas of that are least important or have the 'least energy' and removing them without any noticeable distortions. However, there are limitations, especially where there are large composition elements such as faces and people that cannot be skewed without obvious effects.

To see these very interesting image transformation capabilities see the following video.



The two researchers, Shai Avidan and Ariel Shamir have been promptly recruited by Adobe Systems Incorporated, who in-fact chaired the conference session. I fear this tool may also just get incorporated into Adobe's proprietary image manipulation software, instead of becoming available in the open source arena.

Meanwhile, traditionalists moan the manipulations possible in digital images and note that it undermines the integrity of photographs and the art of photography.