Nofollow attributes were added to the web in 2005, with major search engines and blog/CMS vendors providing support.
I find it interesting that it clearly hasn’t stopped comment spammers, who continue to bombard blogs. I can only assume they don’t care about Pagerank etc, but just want their links to be seen by humans, though I would have assumed most blog owners use spam detection of some kind, and most spam comments which do make it through are unlikely to get clicked on.
But that’s always been the issue with automated spam. Only a tiny number have to be acted upon to make them profitable.
For school work young Owen needed a photo of his family celebrating something, so a suitable photo from a recent birthday party was selected.
I figured I’d upload the photo to BigW photos the night before, to give them a chance to print them out before I arrived the next day. I noticed the disclaimer “Delivery Times: Please allow approximately 10 working days for your order to arrive in the mail or to be ready to be picked up in store” but figured this was just legalese arse-covering, applicable to weird things like coffee mugs etc.
I fully expected to get an email five minutes after submission.
I wondered to myself how it is that they can make any money from a single 10c photo, paid for via PayPal. I figure my order must be costing a buck or two in direct and indirect costs; the PayPal fees alone would be the entirety of the payment.
I didn’t get an email. It’s been four days now, and the order is still “In production” leading me to believe that the order is going to be printed somewhere that isn’t my local BigW, and is then being shipped there. Needless to say, I shan’t be collecting it; the day after the photo upload I went to Bunnings for a hinge and some storage boxes, and popped into Officeworks beforehand anticipating some delay in printing – alas, there was a sixty second delay, so that prudence wasn’t required. Of course, I could have gone to Harvey Norman for the photos but it was an extra 100m walk and another 5c, even if their printing seems to be of a higher quality, a classroom of Prep students isn’t going to appreciate the difference.
Riddle me this: if my photos aren’t printed out at my local BigW, why would I upload them to BigW photos when I could drag myself there in person and collect them within the hour?
Australian consumers can now use their Visa cards to pay for small value transactions of $35 or less without entering a PIN or signing a receipt, Visa announced today.
This requires the retailer to actively persue this strategy, but the payment network no longer demands identification for these “low value” transactions. They claim that security isn’t compromised by this. Their logic goes like this:
$35 isn’t much.
If someone steals your card, they can only obtain $35 worth of goods and services per transaction until the card is shut down.
Your card issuer will eventually notice all of these transactions and phone you to make sure everything is okay.
The retailer wears the risk of these unauthorised transactions
So what’s to stop your teenager borrowing your card to go buy snacks at McDonalds (one of the early adoptors of this security-flexibility) whenever they’re hungry? The card company’s logic goes like this:
$35 isn’t much.
If someone borrows your card without your knowledge, they can only obtain $35 worth of goods and services per transaction.
The retailer wears the risk of these unauthorised transactions
So why would a retailer run the risk of a month’s worth of Coles supermarket purchases (another early adopter) – which could easily exceed $1000 with one or two purchases a day – being fraudently run up? Because when you compain to your card issuer, they require a police report. The police, being a diligent lot, will follow up these $35 thefts, go to the stores, look at the video footage, realise they don’t know what you look like, come around to your house and compare the picture against you and decide it’s not you. Then they’ll think “How did this person who isn’t the cardholder get hold of the card and the cardholder didn’t notice until they got the bill?” and they’ll suspect an inside job, and ask you if you recognise the person in the video footage. If you want your teenager to have a crimal record with 30+ theft convictions you’ll scream “Sarah! Come here!” and that will be that; otherwise you might stay quiet.
Of course, it might not be your teenage daughter with the munchies; somebody at work might borrow the card from the wallet on your desk to buy lunch when they’ve run out of cash, or friends when you’re out “dining” at McDonalds.
Worse yet is the organised criminals who can easily prove their expenditure is not their own – it was in another state! Because there’s no motivation to Express Post your card to an interstate confederate for them to have a quick run around with it before Express Posting it back. In short order it can become quite a bill too – at Apple Stores it’s up to $150 without a signature being needed. These expenditures can be book-ended by legit local purchases, leading the card holder to say “well, I never authorized that, I’ve still got the card, so you figure it out”. The costs of these thefts, which all the video footage in the world isn’t going to connect to the cardholder, and with some precautions the confederate either, goes onto the general costs of running the retail operation, pushing up prices.
Retailers always had the option of skipping the need to sign for a transaction – be it on their own heads. So presumably they think that the video footage will reduce the level of experienced loss.
Now, presumably this fraud will cost less than the expenditure saved – assuming a check-out chick costs $25/hour to employ it implies at least 1.4 person-hours are saved per fraud, and assuming a saving of four seconds per transaction, they’re expecting no more than 1 fraud in 1280 transactions. But I ask: isn’t it better to pay $35 to Aussie Battlers… working Aussie families… our most valuable assets rather than hand over, say $30, to criminals through lax security?
With contactless payments finally with us, there’s even more reason to fear unauthorized transactions, per this video of a guy stealing the identifying information off a smart card:
It appears that in addition to annual fees, international conversion fees, interest charges and so forth, the price of a credit card is the same as freedom: eternal vigilance.
All of this is lovely and academic, but the activity by retailers and card issuers has the effect of turning every card in my wallet into many unchallenged $35 purchases. This acts as a motivator to steal my cards from me. If my wallet is stolen, I can immediately cancel the cards, so no risk there. So to get at the lovely $35 goodness, the thief needs to stop me doing that – clonking the victim on the head is a good way of preventing reporting. I like my head. I don’t mind spending 4 seconds a transaction to prevent a increase in people getting brained.
The worst part is there’s no way to opt out of this reduced security; I can’t say to Visa: “No, for my card, only pay money when a PIN is supplied.” It’s forced on everyone. I remember when these PIN things came out, and I was repeatedly assured that they were more secure than a signature, and I could assure them that it wasn’t – the damn PIN is encoded on the mag strip of the card (precisely copied in seconds!), and any fool can see you keying your PIN in. Now another layer of security has been whittled away, leaving… video investigation.
The census delivery chick turned up and offered us the option of paper or electronic form.
Two programmers looked at each other, thought about how they value their time and the response was a no-brainer:
“We’re programmers,” I explained, “we’ll take the paper form.”
“There’s a phone number you can call if you have any trouble filling out the electronic form” reassures the collector.
Cathy thinks: “Sure, that line won’t have any trouble when twenty million Australians simultaneously log into the web site to fill in the forms via a broken SSL link, using IE specific controls (that only work under some versions Windows assuming they’re correctly patched and have the right libraries loaded), demanding full round-trips to the underspec’d Windows servers to populate unnecessarily complex custom controls, some of which will no doubt demand Flash or COM. Come to think of it, it probably won’t even be web based, and we’ve only got two Windows boxes, one of which is tucked under a table (Yay! Census night on the floor swearing at the ABS’s programmers!) and the other has a screen resolution that went out with buggy whips (I’ve had programs barf and refuse to run because the resolution was unacceptable).”
We chose paper. For another view of the world, I’m looking forward hearing to how census night worked for Daniel…
Seeing weird behaviour on Marita and Justine’s PCs: trying to access Hotmail, and most other Microsoft web sites, the browser will divert to login.live.com, but not be able to render the page. It appears to load much or all of the data, but never completes.
It’s apparently been doing this for about a week, on both PCs, using a variety of browsers installed on them, including IE9, Firefox 3 and 5 and Chrome — so presumably not a cache problem.
It’s affecting hotmail, microsoft.com, msn.com (which in Australia redirects to iat.ninemsn.com.au/tickler ), even support.microsoft.com. It seems the common ground is they all use live.com/Passport for authentication.
However if you use IE’s Help / Online Support option, it does get to the relevant page. I wonder if that bypasses the authentication stage.
Using View Source, it appears the pages partially load, but do not complete, so do not render completely (eg ninemsn.com.au), or at all in some cases (hotmail.com). Or on some sites (including this blog) it loads the page, but chokes on other content (such as the addthis.com sharing widget).
One PC is running Vista, one XP. Both have the latest patches. One has MS Security Essentials, the other AVG.
They both use the same connection via a router and modem, but other devices (such as a phone browsing via wifi and the same router/modem) don’t have the issue.
Tried turning off the firewall. No luck. Tried removing all of last week’s Windows patches. No luck.
The net connection is okay. A speed test says line speed is 4.75 Mbps.
The affected web sites are fine at my place.
Anybody seeing the same? Any ideas of things to try?
Update 9:05pm. Tried bypassing the wireless router in favour of the modem. It now all works. So it’s some weird-arse setting on the router. Investigations continue.
Update 9:30pm. Would you believe rebooting the modem fixed it? Blargh! This is why they always suggest to turn things off then on again.
Was clearing out some papers on the weekend and found this: an order form for a Gateway computer from June 2000. I can hardly believe I used to spend that much dosh on buying computers.
To this day, the speakers that came with it (from “Cambridge Soundworks”) are still going strong, even though their beige colour doesn’t match all the black stuff.
As of August 1st, we will discontinue support for the following browsers and their predecessors: Firefox 3.5, Internet Explorer 7, and Safari 3.
I suppose IE6 was around for so long that it’s easy to think of IE7 as being “new”. But in fact it’s five years old this year (official release October 2006), and was officially superseded two years ago.
Hopefully all those corporates who dragged their heels on IE6 can move a little faster off IE7.
Got a new phone. HTC Desire S. Nice. Will blog here as I discover how it works.
Friday night
Played around with it as it charged while plugged into the mains. Thought I’d got the PIN wrong when I initially started it, and it only gives you three goes. First try: PIN from the SIM didn’t work. Second try a PIN from the account which I thought I could remember (but never can… you never do, so who uses it?) On a hunch the final try I tried the SIM PIN again, and got it right. Obviously I’d mistyped it. Annoying only three goes though.
Startup sequence guided me through setting up the phone. Pretty good. Happily said it would connect via Bluetooth to the old phone and copy contacts, calendar and SMSs across. Gave specific instructions for what to do on the other end (Nokia N95). Neato.
Figured out there was a wifi network, and asked for details. It appears to use that where possible, or mobile if not available.
HTC don’t appear to publish the SAR ratings on the web, but they are clearly marked on a sticker inside the box: 0.445 (head) 0.542 (body). This is reasonably low — I’m surprised they don’t shout about it more. I had wanted a phone with a low rating… the only place I saw it listed was on a Norwegian mobile dealer’s web site (which was found thanks to Chelsworthgale on Twitter — note their table of various brands… some of the Sonys are very high).
It also synced up to my Google account and linked to my Twitter account.
Saturday morning
I think I’ve figured out the basic navigation now, in particular the hard buttons along the bottom.
The sync to Google may not have been especially helpful. It’s added lots of contacts with email-only who I never talk to. I suspect many of them I’ve never emailed, but may have received messages from via email discussion lists. Will require a cleanup. Looking at Gmail on my PC, it’s not immediately obvious where I can clean this up… though hopefully it’s there somewhere, as it’d take ages via the phone.
Ah, in the Contact list you can only display those with a phone number: People; options; View; Only with phone number. That makes things easier to deal with. (Found via the Google Mobile support forum.)
Web access looks okay. Twitter works okay, but I haven’t figured out what the difference is between the Twitter app (is that the built-in Android one?) and the HTC Sense Twitter app.
Need to figure out the alert sounds. Nokias have profiles which can be easily set so if you’re in a meeting you can switch it to silent. I’m not yet clear on how to do that.
I’m also not clear on how much battery the seemingly always-running apps are burning. This article suggests some ways of cutting battery use (for the Desire, not specifically the Desire S).
Sunday evening
The battery ran out last night, which didn’t seem like outstanding life, but I suppose I’d been fiddling with it most of the day, and it was the first charge.
I recharged overnight and the battery life has been much better today.
I’m suspicious of the fact that icons hang around in the top-left area, occupying memory and perhaps taking battery life. Last night I tried the “Car panel” application, but bailed out when it asked me precisely what I wanted to do. A car icon showed up, and didn’t go away (even overnight after shutting down and restarting the phone) until I again went into the “Car Panel” properly and shut it down fully.
It’s a similar story with the Twitter and GMail applications. Of course I’m more likely to want them hanging around, but if I spend some time at my PC, I don’t really want my phone beeping when Tweets or emails arrive. It’d be nice to be able to shut apps off completely when not needed. Perhaps as I keep learning how to use the phone, I’ll work out how to deal with this.
At first I didn’t like the typing, but I’m getting used to it, and HTC’s version of predictive text works quite well… as long as I’m not trying to write a #RoadMorons Tweet quoting someone’s licence plate number.
The Android Market works quite well, at least for the two free apps I downloaded — Angry Birds (ad supported, about as fun to play as on Google Chrome), and Tram Hunter, an unofficial Android version of Tram Tracker, which works well.
Niggles aside, I’m enjoying the phone a lot.
Monday lunchtime
Noticed last night that the weather app that runs as default splashes animated rain drops and a windscreen wiper over the screen when it’s raining. And when the sun was shining this morning, that was animated too. Cute. However this morning it was claiming that in Melbourne it was 4 degrees outside… in fact the Bureau of Meteorology reckoned it was 10.
Tried out charging via USB from a PC. Good; very handy.
The article that Terry linked to (in the comments) is very good at explaining how Android works with background apps, and has a nice reminder that This Ain’t Windows, and it doesn’t always matter if stuff continues running.
Paul2’s tip that you can drag the notification panel down to look more closely at it is handy, and something I don’t recall seeing in the instructions (though I haven’t read them in great detail). It also gives access to quick settings such as turning WAP on and off, which is handy for preserving battery life.
The old Nokia N95 in screen saver mode would still tell you the time (and a couple of monochrome icons for missed calls, new messages). The Desire S won’t tell you anything, except it flashes an LED if there’s something new that’s come in. As I mentioned above, this is not necessarily a good thing when GMail and Twitter are sending notifications of stuff I’ve already spotted from my PC, and I only really want to know about text messages and missed calls. And it’d be nice to be able to see the time without waking the phone up.
Update Monday night
Uploading to Youtube was problematic over 3G, but worked okay from home over Wifi. The video quality seems okay.
Likewise, Flickr (using the builtin app, some HTC creation) was causing trouble over 3G, but fine over Wifi. Tony recommended I try Flickroid instead, which I will. The photo quality seems okay, and at the full size, there’s a reasonable amount of detail.
Thursday night
Just a few more thoughts…
OK, the battery life of this thing appears to (just) get me through 24 hours. The fact that it can be charged via USB is excellent, but I suppose standard these days.
Found my pics/video while browsing the phone’s file system in DCIM/100MEDIA, which wasn’t exactly intuitive, but wasn’t too hard to find.
Also found on the file system: a full PDF manual!
Most of the photos I’ve taken are lovely and clear. I still need to play around with the video to get a sense of the quality, but at first glance it seems not too bad.
The Twitter client has crashed a couple of times. Not really clear why.
I’ll probably get used to switching off wifi when I leave the house.
Likewise, getting used to how text messages are handled, in threads by sender.
Yesterday morning the house suddenly went black – except for the oven clock, which made it clear that the RCD had been tripped. I went out and reset it, and then the fuse for one of the electrical circuits tripped. After resetting that and having it not trip again, I checked a few suspects out and discovered that my washing machine was dead. With a full load of water. I powered it off at the wall and went about the rest of my morning, later siphoning it empty. Checking again showed it still dead.
The next day I pulled the user interface off the front to diagnose which module had blown (fearing it was the notorious front panel), and in powering it up to check with a multimeter it came good. Ish. It mostly worked, but ended up lighting up the display in a way that was clearly an error code, and various combinations of functionality checking seemed to me that the agitator motor wasn’t working.
I suspected that the error code could tell me what exactly was the cause of the motor not working, but finding a Fisher & Paykel MW058U service manual is no easy task. Finding the model number is surprisingly easy – wiggle the machine forward and on the back, helpfully slapped on upside-down is the full details of the machine (why it couldn’t be printed on the front panel art is beyond me).
Reading the manual made it clear that something bad had happened (one of motor wiring bad, motor bad, motor controller bad), and phoning a helpful call-out tech I discovered I could expect something around $300 to repair. This is half the price of a new machine… so I guess we’ll go with repair. As an aside: if I can provide a broad diagnosis, or at least model and error codes, why can’t some firms even provide a guesstimate on cost?
Now that Microsoft has bought Skype, it’ll be interesting to see which platforms are supported in, say, 6-12 months time. I bet Windows Phone 7 will be there, but will any disappear?
Skype has benefited from being independent of any operating system or platform. If there’s sufficient users for an operating system, Skype made the necessary software. Windows, Mac, Linux, iPhone, Android etc, all have Skype downloads because it was in Skype’s corporate interest to have broad based coverage.
Now, that corporate interest has changed. Any Skype development will go through the filter of serving Microsoft’s broader corporate agenda. Despite Microsoft’s assurances, that will gradually change Skype into something that gives preference to Windows, Windows Phone and other Microsoft products.
