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2008-09-01, late at night
I have a confession to make: I don’t like passwords.
To clarify that statement, I don’t like seeing passwords. A row of asterisks
is fine: perfectly happy with that. A row of little black circles is even
better: after all, it’s prettier. But looking at a monitor, sheet of paper or
Post-It note and seeing a password staring back at me sends a little shiver
running down my spine. Some cultures are reputed to believe that taking a
photograph of someone steals a little piece of their soul; I tend to think
much the same about writing down someone’s password. “Keep it secret”, as they
say; “keep it safe”.
This, of course, is pretty much the standard geek attitude to passwords: they
are to be guarded with one’s life. Offer a geek a
Mars bar for their password, and they’ll offer you an angry stream
of verbal abuse. Or possibly a lecture on social engineering and user account
security. Knowing most geeks, it’ll probably be somewhere between the two.
All of this leads up to a discussion of two things: the OAuth
protocol which aims, amongst other laudable goals, to help safeguard users’
passwords, and the distinctly unnerving trend which
Jeremy
Keith has christened the password anti-pattern,
which really doesn’t.
Read on…
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2008-08-03, late at night
This weekend, I have been clearing out the house that
Jo and I have been sharing
this past year. As soon as is feasible, I plan to find a flat somewhere in or
around Cambridge and shift all of my worldly possessions into it.
This week, Ben Ward
has been clearing out the London flat that he has been sharing with
David Singleton this past year.
Tomorrow, he plans to emigrate to San Francisco and work for
Yahoo! Brickhouse.
I wish us both the best of luck. It’s going to be interesting.
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2007-08-27, late at night
Well, things have been more than a little insane of late: I’ve gone from a fixed-term contract to full-term employment (with Hyperspheric), moved house (with Jo, giving me an opportunity to use XFN’s co-resident attribute) and engaged in a survival exercise whereby I had to cope for two weeks with neither fridge nor delicious internets (the latter of which has been solved by Be who, by and large, have been excellent).
The majority of the insanity, however, is now mercifully behind me (with the exception of my brand new copy of Bioshock, which seems to feature insanity fairly prominently), so it’s now time to look forward to the future. And to a new experience.
It’s quite a popular topic of conversation: those lucky people who have done it before talk about how fantastic it is, and many of those who have not yet had the pleasure think about what it would be like. Those in this latter category, such as myself, wonder who it’s going to be with, whether we’re going to be any good at it, and of course there’s the worry that it’s going to be over almost before it starts.
Not to mention all the fun that’s going to happen between sessions.
I’m talking, of course, about BarCamp Brighton, at which I lose my BarCamp virginity. As the aspects of last year’s South by Southwest which I remember most fondly were the sense of community and the bouncing around of thoughts and ideas, this looks to be precisely that, without the registration fee or the 12-hour journey time. For those of you who will be attending, I look forward eagerly to seeing you there.
Oh, and I’ve ordered myself a shiny new MacBook: after all, I hear these things can be much more fun if you bring the right toys along.
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2007-04-19, late at night
Recently I received something which was simultaneously both a compliment and an insult, and which was a source of both pleasant surprise and bitter disappointment.
A certain record label (which, for the purposes of this post, will remain nameless) decided that, as a marketing experiment, they would sent pre-release copies of one of their artists’ new albums (which, for the purposes of this post, will also remain nameless) to people who owned and maintained blogs. While there is, of course, no obligation for the blogger to publicise the album in question, either in a full review or simply recommendations to friends, that is clearly what the record label is hoping for. I have no problem with that whatsoever: if I think the album is worth buying, I will – in all likelihood – tell people about it.
However…
When I got hold of my free bit of schwag, my first act was to rip it into iTunes: as I listen to the vast majority of my music in the office, and as I don’t really want to cart a load of CDs around with me, having a new album on my iPod as quickly as possible to give it a good few listens through is a Very Good Thing™.
Unless, of course, the record label has misaligned the tracks on the CD with the songs on the album, so that what iTunes thinks is a track comprises half of one song and half of the next. This is not simply a careless mistake: the record label has deliberately broken the pre-release copies of the album to discourage (so I have been told) recipients from sharing the tracks online.
The way I read this is as follows: “We value your opinion, we want you to check this out and tell your friends what you think. Oh, and by the way, we think you’re a criminal”. Not to mention a criminal who isn’t smart enough to get his copy of QuickTime and re-align the tracks to rip them properly.
This is all a terrible shame, as the album in question is really very good: so much so that, had it not come bundled with a free slap in the face, I would have made sure that anyone with a remotely compatible music taste to myself would have known how good I thought it was. Still, I truly hope that enough people take umbrage to provide a valuable lesson for record companies: if you want to market to bloggers, and if you want them to help you, don’t piss them off.
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2007-04-04, late at night
Two events of particular note have occurred in the news recently: both of them are excellent news for consumers, both of them represent apparent shifts in attitude from companies I would have otherwise thought thoroughly intransigent, and both of them have put a smile on my face.
The first of these events is, as those of you who follow the news and know my stance on DRM may well have guessed, is EMI’s decision to provide DRM-free music from the iTunes Music Store. This is a thoroughly welcome decision for my part, and I truly hope to see more record companies and other “content providers” following suit. As a direct result of this, I now have an iTunes Music Store account: I don’t doubt that there are quite a number of other people who have done the same.
The other event which has me smiling is Microsoft’s decision to start up an Xbox Disc Replacement Plan, whereby damaged game discs can be cheaply replaced (£10 in the UK, $20 in the States). While other publishers have offered a service to replace damaged game media for a small fee (under the premise that the gamer is paying for a license to play the game, rather than the media itself), Microsoft’s returns policy up until now has boiled down to two words. The polite version of these two words is “go away”; I shall leave it to you, dear reader, to guess the impolite version.
As the proud owner of a stricken Gears of War disc, I’m very glad to see this scheme come into effect – of course, I would have been happier to see it come into effect before I bought myself a full-price replacement copy, but better late than never.
Do these shifts in policy, both related to DRM and companies deciding not to shaft their paying customers with it, represent a more global shift in corporate attitudes? Are they just isolated incidents which happen to have occurred within days of one another? Or should we just be glad that they’ve happened now, and not worry too much about where it will lead?
I think I’m going to go for the third one.
