Author: dave Page 56 of 75

Do you know where your dog is right now? Or your cat?

Or, more to the point, where’s your car? Your laptop? Son? Wife? Husband?

Soon, (for some people, perhaps it’s already happening) you’ll be able to track virtually anything, anywhere, anytime.

Not sure what the heck I’m talking about? Consider this excerpt from UFOs (Ubiquitous Findable Objects) by Peter Morville, posted on the Oreilly Network:

The term ambient findability describes a world at the crossroads of ubiquitous computing and the internet, in which we can find anyone or anything from anywhere at any time. It’s not necessarily a goal, and we’ll never achieve perfect findability, but we’re surely headed in the right direction.

A clear sign of progress is the emergence of ubiquitous findable objects (UFOs). GPS, RFID, UWB, and cellular triangulation enable us, for the first time in history, to tag and track products, possessions, pets, and people as they wander through space and time.

Morville goes on to cite all kinds of examples of how the “brave new world of UFOs” is playing out. Of course, there are two sides to the issue, and not everyone thinks this kind of thing is a good thing.

The arguments for and against are thought-provoking and not nearly as clear-cut as we like to think. I tend to be a bit flippant in my comments about serious topics (oh really?) but this is pretty serious stuff. I recommend you read Morville’s whole article, and explore some of the links in it. He goes into a lot more detail than I do here.

Many of us are opposed to giving out personal information on principle, but we willingly relinquish it every day, through the use of cookies on our computer, loyalty programs, credit cars, ATM activity, security cards at work, applications for all kinds of thing, etc. There is a lot of information about all of us out there, and by and large, we enjoy the benefits that come with that.

But how far is too far? I carry a cell phone, which can be used to track my movements. That might be a good thing if I’m lost, but what if I’m playing hooky from work? Who decides which is which?

A while back, I posted an item on social bookmarking (for example, those tags at the end of this article) that is fast becoming a popular way for people to share interests with each other, as well as track down all kinds of information.

The success of social bookmarking depends on all of us giving up a certain amount of our privacy in exchange for the benefits of getting access to a wider community. I’m willing to let you see my photos on Flickr and I’m hoping that you won’t use them for a bad purpose.

I’m also willing to put you on my buddy list, so you can see whether I’m at my computer or not. But I think I’ll draw the line at letting you track my movements via my GPS collar, or something like that. At least, I will if I know about it. My point is that it’s starting to look more and more as though I won’t know about it. The RFID tag on the collar of my shirt might provide a signal that those who know what they’re doing can match to me and follow the shirt’s progress throughout the city. Sounds crazy, sure. But I don’t think it’s out of the question.

As with so much of today’s technology, we latch on to the cool stuff and all the neat things that we can do. But there’s always two sides to every story. And sometimes we get carried away before we’ve fully considered all the facts. By the time we do, it’s often too late to get the genie back into the bottle.

Don’t get me wrong, I’m not advocating for putting the brakes on any of this new technology. I think it’s great stuff and I firmly believe it’s going to make the world more interesting for all of us. But we need to have free and open discussion about how we all benefit from this stuff, not just a few. And we have to make sure that we don’t cede control over our lives to some “Big Brother” type of group, or company, without ensuring we have the means to follow what they’re doing.

I know these issues will keep coming up. In the meantime, I’d love to hear what some of you think about UFOs. Or anything else I’ve touched on. While I like to hear myself type, I’d love to get a conversation going with a bunch of you. Feel free to comment anytime on anything.

Thanks to grockwel for pointing me to this topic

MediaChannel.org, which bills itself as “a media issues supersite, featuring criticism, breaking news, and investigative reporting from hundreds of organizations worldwide” is used to dealing with critics who denounce it for its decidedly left-wing slant on the world’s news.

But now, according to a post today on the front page, the site is facing a more insidious threat, as hackers are systematically trying to put the site out of business.

Perhaps it is a coincidence, perhaps not, but on the very week that MediaChannel is offering information on the protests against the media role in the Iraq War, (link added) and as our traffic grows, parties unknown are targeting the site with a flood of vicious technical attacks designed to bring our website down.

Fighting these attacks has taken up hours of time by our webmaster and hosting company. It is draining our already meager resources. We need help from internet security specialists we cannot afford. What started as sporadic denial of service attacks has mushroomed into ongoing multiple and coordinated attacks by people determined to destroy Mediachannel.org and deprive our readers from viewing the site and taking part in our community of concerned readers worldwide.

This attack on free speech is serious, potentially well-financed and beyond our ability to deal with. We will have to cut back on what we can offer until we are able to more effectively fight back.

If this is really an attack on a site by someone determined to shut it down for saying the wrong things, it marks a disturbing new direction for press freedoms. And coming just a week after the vicious crackdown on press freedoms in Kenya, one can’t help but be worried for the future.

I remember years ago hearing talk about how there was so much money squirreled away in old accounts and that it was difficult for banks to close those accounts. So they (the banks) wanted to find a way to do it without having to wait years, or having to track down the owners, etc. I think I may have written a story about it at one time.

Well, it appears that those clever banks have found a way around that. It’s called a service charge. You know what I’m talking about. We pay them all the time, to banks, waiters, rental firms — all kinds of places. Usually, they’re tied to some kind of service that you’ve received, hence the name.

You don’t notice them that much when you’re using your bank account. For example, you pay one when you withdraw money, or write a cheque, or use your debit card, etc. If you don’t want to pay each time, you can sometimes pay a lump sum each month and then get “unlimited” access to your accounts.

But what you might not notice is that most accounts now include a charge called a “monthly fee” or something like that. It’s just a fee you pay, no matter what you do that month. Sometimes those fees are waived if you maintain a minimum balance, but in most cases, they just get added to your account each month.

“It’s in the mail”

This morning, I got a bank statement in the mail. I opened it, because it had my address on it. But after I’d ripped open the envelope, I noticed that while it was my address, it wasn’t my name. Ooops! But wait a minute. That is my address, so what the heck is going on? So I looked a little closer.

According to the statement, a couple (presumably, since both of their names are on there) had opened an account, with my home address, on Feb 13, 1999. That was about 18 months after we’d bought the house. First big problem.

Also, according to the statement, after opening the account, they made one deposit, for $242.47. And that’s it. No further activity on the account. Presumably, it might even have been a mistake or whatever, because nothing more was ever done with the account.

Enter the service charge

Except the account was a “Powerchequing” account. So every month from then on, $2 was deducted at the end of each month as a service charge, just for the privilege of having the account. The bank didn’t do anything, except process the service charge. There was no interest calculated. Nothing. Except that $2 each month.

So over the years, the $2 has been grinding away, until finally, the bank had taken every dime out of the account.

The service charges weren’t always the same. On October 31, 2000, the monthly charge went up to $2.50 per month. And then on April 15, 2002, there was an extra service charge of $20. With no explanation.

On Mar 31, 2005, the service charge jumped to $3.50 per month. And on April 15, 2005, there is another unexplained service charge of $30.

OK, now here’s the funny part. On Sept 30, 2005, the monthly service charge of $3.50 put the account into the red. The balance is now $-2.53. So the bank added an overdraft interest charge of $.04 to the total. The next month — same thing.

It takes until Feb. 23, 2006, when the account is overdrawn to the tune of $20.78 before the bank takes action. Since they’re not actually getting any money out of this thing anymore, they simply deposit $20.78 into the account to bring the balance back to $0.00 and close it. Simple.

Then, a few weeks later, I get this notice. As far as I know, this is the first bank statement I’ve received this whole time, although the name sounds familiar, so there may have been other mail over the last 7 years. But I don’t think any of it was a bank statement.

Who’s your Daddy?

The bottom line is that although this money was abandoned, and left dormant in a bank account that the owner had probably forgotten about, the bank has made sure that they won’t have any trouble tracking down the rightful owner. Thanks to the power of the service charge, they now have all the money. So they can just close it down.

I’m still left wondering about those two big service charges, one for $20 and one for $30. What could possibly justify those kinds of charges on an account that had never had any action except the automatic debits of service charges?

Chalk up another win for the bank and the power of service charges. They’re sort of the evil cousin of compound interest, aren’t they?

In a previous life, I was a reporter for The Saskatoon Star Phoenix, covering the legislature in Regina. Our sister paper was The Regina Leader Post, and before my newspaper career was over, I ended up working for both of them, through a shared legislature bureau called Leader Star news.

I left the newspaper business in October, 1995, to join the Corporate Communications world with SaskTel. My timing was great. Three months later, Conrad Black bought both papers and a few short months later engineered one of the largest mass firings in Canadian media history.

One of my colleagues from those days was Bill Doskoch, who is now a blogger and works as an editor for CTV.ca. In a recent post, he describes the carnage 10 years ago when he and a lot of his colleagues at the Leader Post and Star Phoenix were fired.

It’s quite a story, and I can’t help but think of how lucky I was to have gotten out of there in the nick of time. Some of my friends survived those days and are still with the papers. But I don’t think things have ever been the same. Of course, things have gone downhill for Conrad Black as well, but that’s still small consolation for all those he so ruthlessly tossed out into the street.

Thanks to Eric at Mutually Inclusive for the link.

You might have noticed that I’ve started adding Technorati Tags to each of my posts as my contribution to the social bookmarking movement. Before you ask why, let me explain that I’m not even sure that I understand what the heck they’re doing. But it’s a cool way to look for information on sites like Technorati, where you can search the blogosphere for just about anything.

I’ve also started posting items to del.icio.us, which you can check out and follow yourself. Those items are also tagged.

And I have a Flickr account, where some of my pictures are tagged, although I’ve just started adding tags and most of them aren’t there yet.

All of these sites are considered part of this Web 2.0 phenomenon, which I’ve written about before and plenty of others are writing about all the time. (See this Technorati Search on Web 2.0)

Despite all of the above, I don’t have a great handle on what’s going on, but it’s fun to be playing along. Today, I came across an interesting post (thanks to BlackRimGlasses.com) which pointed me to a blog called Eirepreneur, and a post called How Social Bookmarking can lead to the Semantic Web. Talk about a lot of cool connections, and I don’t even know any of those guys’ names!

OK, so now we’ve moved from social bookmarking, which I only kind of understand, on to the semantic web, which I really don’t know much about. But as I read the post, I became fascinated by the discussion. Just how do we identify, sort and act on information? What kind of markers can we use to pass along our knowledge, and can we find ways to do it that work even when we don’t realize what’s happening? That’s what seems to be happening with Social Bookmarking. It’s happening, although we aren’t quite sure what “it” is.

This is a dynamic post (to coin another popular phrase.) That just means I don’t have a conclusion — I’m just watching what’s going on to see where it goes. In the meantime, consider how Social Bookmarking, or Tagging, or Linking, or whatever you want to call it, might fit into your own world. And don’t be afraid to start using it. It’s pretty cool and you might even make some new friends along the way. Next, I’m sure we’ll all be creating our own MySpace pages.

I’m sure there will be more to come in this area. And, by the way, feel free to add your own thoughts to this conversation by commenting on what I’ve done here.

As a former resident, I can’t resist linking to this video of someone in Regina, Saskatchewan (apparently outside the SaskPower building, from what I can tell) throwing boiling water into the air at -40C. The result is pretty cool.

As crazy as it sounds, this is actually becoming a popular fad in Regina in the cold weather. A couple of years ago, I was in Mexico during the winter and one of my travel companions noticed that the CBC Morning show back in Regina was talking about people doing just that very thing (at -30C). So we came up with a great plan to throw a cup of water up in the air at +30C, capture the results on video and e-mail them back to Saskatchewan. Alas, the video camera didn’t work and then it was happy hour and after a couple of Margaritas, we forgot about it. Just as well, since we were planning to send the video to a radio program anyway!

And thanks to Cory Doctorow at Boing, Boing for pointing out the story.

There are two threads to this post.

First, it seems really easy to get a story in the media about how if you don’t keep a close watch on your employees, they’ll screw your company. The vehicle of choice usually seems to be giving them Internet access.

Over at Techdirt today, there’s a good post about how the latest survey purporting to support that idea is once again shown to be sponsored by a company with an obvious conflict of interest.

As the post points out, there are so many reasons why employees should use the Internet at work that it’s hard to know where to start:

But, did they bother to look at whether or not that personal surfing was actually damaging? Nah. Did they look at whether or not that personal surfing helped give employees a much needed break that helped them be more productive while working? Nah. Did they look at how people who were blocked from personal surfing found other ways to waste time? Nah. Did they look at how those who are allowed to personal surf at work often use it to take care of tasks that would otherwise take them away from work? Nah. Did they look at how so many companies today expect employees to be on call so that work invades their home as well? Nah. Did they look at how allowing personal surfing at work tends to make happier, more loyal employees? Nah. Or did they look at any of the other research that has shown that employees who do personal surfing at work tend to more than make it up by doing work at home? Nah, of course not.

The second thread is similar. We are too obsessed with “security,” these days. It’s become much easier to slap a “restricted” label on something and limit access than to assess it realistically and figure out who should see the information. In fact, that’s the wrong way to look at information. Instead of “who should see this?” it should be, “Who should not see this?” In most cases, there is really no good reason to restrict access, beyond the obvious “because.”

It’s ironic that as tools proliferate to allow us to access more information, there are so many people convinced we need to restrict access. It’s not that simple. As Adam Curry puts it on his weblog, “There are no secrets. Only information you do not yet have.”

We need to make sure that people have access to the information they need to do their jobs better. But we also need to make sure that they continue to have access to as much information as possible, without arbitrary restrictions that are based more on the old “information is power” paradigm so many people still subscribe to.

I know there is a lot more to this story. We could get into protecting personal information, financial information, etc. I don’t mean to negate the idea of security. But I do think that the knee-jerk “secure this” has become a crutch for many people. We need to rethink all of our access to information provisions, both public and private.

Seth Godin has a pointer to a hilarious video on YouTube – microsoft ipod packaging parody.

As he puts it, “If you’ve ever worked in a place with more than three marketers, this is so accurate, you might cry.”

So true…

UPDATE — If you didn’t catch this video when I posted this note, you’re out of luck now. It’s been removed from You Tube. Sorry…