Category: Technology

Neat story from the NY Times Matt Richtel on cellphone vigilantes:

SAN FRANCISCO, Nov. 2 — One afternoon in early September, an architect boarded his commuter train and became a cellphone vigilante. He sat down next to a 20-something woman who he said was “blabbing away” into her phone.

“She was using the word ‘like’ all the time. She sounded like a Valley Girl,” said the architect, Andrew, who declined to give his last name because what he did next was illegal.

Andrew reached into his shirt pocket and pushed a button on a black device the size of a cigarette pack. It sent out a powerful radio signal that cut off the chatterer’s cellphone transmission — and any others in a 30-foot radius.

“She kept talking into her phone for about 30 seconds before she realized there was no one listening on the other end,” he said. His reaction when he first discovered he could wield such power? “Oh, holy moly! Deliverance.”

As cellphone use has skyrocketed, making it hard to avoid hearing half a conversation in many public places, a small but growing band of rebels is turning to a blunt countermeasure: the cellphone jammer, a gadget that renders nearby mobile devices impotent.

The technology is not new, but overseas exporters of jammers say demand is rising and they are sending hundreds of them a month into the United States . . . [Read the rest of the story]

Two University of British Columbia professors contend that consumers tend to trust the reputations of sellers affiliated with Amazon.com/Amazon.ca more than they trust sellers at eBay. This has important implications for online commerce because, in several studies, one of the significant barriers that inhibit consumers from making purchases online are concerns about data privacy, protection of credit card information, a confidence that they will actually receive the goods purchased online; and that they have confidence that they will be able to return the goods in the event of an unsatisfactory purchase.

UBC officials say the paper is online though I couldn’t find it when I visited the site this morning. Here’s an excerpt from the press release:

[UBC] professors Paul Chwelos and Tirtha Dhar compared the reputation mechanisms for two popular online retail sites, Amazon and eBay. Both sites allow for publicly-visible feedback on commercial transactions, covering everything from product quality to timely delivery of the goods.

The researchers argue that sellers who inflate their reputations may be doing online marketplaces such as eBay more harm than good.

Making the better business case is Amazon, where the researchers found that more useful feedback on these transactions leads to higher sales and prices.

“Our analysis shows that online marketplaces are more likely to win over consumers when they provide more useful reputation management mechanisms,” says Chwelos. “People are willing to hand over their money when they're getting meaningful feedback.”

Their study, Differences in 'Truthiness' across Online Reputation Mechanisms, shows that consumers find that the reputation mechanism at Amazon elicits much more truthful and helpful feedback than eBay's.

The current system at eBay encourages buyers and sellers to dole out positive feedback since this will enhance their position to buy or sell the next time around. As well, they fear that negative comments could trigger a backlash that will impact their own standing.

“The design of the eBay feedback provides an environment for buyers and sellers to pat each other's back, with glowingly positive feedback,” says Chwelos.

There are no such incentives at Amazon to tippy toe around reputations since only buyers can post their comments. The one-way system invites shoppers to be as honest as they want without any fear of reprisal. As a result, the feedback at Amazon reflects more accurately the user's underlying experience with the transaction, whether good or bad.

Not surprisingly, adds Chwelos, shoppers pay more attention to reputation scores that they believe to be true and accurate, but will discount scores when they are suspect.

“Buyers aren't keen on sites where bloated and perhaps unwarranted reputations are the norm.” he says, “Buyers largely ignore positive feedback on eBay.”

However, eBay is retooling its website with a new mechanism called “Feedback 2.0” that invites buyers to provide four categories of feedback about sellers: item description, communication and delivery time, and postage and packaging charges.

A top executive at America's biggest Internet service provider says the interests of Hollywood are more important than the interests of its customers:

AT&T to target pirated content

It joins Hollywood in trying to keep bootleg material off its network.

AT&T Inc. has joined Hollywood studios and recording companies in trying to keep pirated films, music and other content off its network — the first major carrier of Internet traffic to do so.

The San Antonio-based company started working last week with studios and record companies to develop anti-piracy technology that would target the most frequent offenders, said James W. Cicconi, an AT&T senior vice president.

The nation's largest telephone and Internet service provider also operates the biggest cross-country system for handling Internet traffic for its customers and those of other providers.

As AT&T has begun selling pay-television services, the company has realized that its interests are more closely aligned with Hollywood, Cicconi said in an interview Tuesday. The company's top leaders recently decided to help Hollywood protect the digital copyrights to that content… [Read the full story]

As smart guy David Weinberger says, “Putting a cop in the middle of the network and making available content not accessible by other networks means that if AT&T says it's offering Internet connectivity, it's lying.”

Global net censorship 'growing'

The level of state-led censorship of the net is growing around the world, a study of so-called internet filtering by the Open Net Initiative suggests.
The study of thousands of websites across 120 Internet Service Providers found 25 of 41 countries surveyed showed evidence of content filtering.
Websites and services such as Skype and Google Maps were blocked, it said.
Such “state-mandated net filtering” was only being carried out in “a couple” of states in 2002, one researcher said.
“In five years we have gone from a couple of states doing state-mandated net filtering to 25,” said John Palfrey, at Harvard Law School.

BBC NEWS | Technology | Global net censorship 'growing'.

The Open Net Initiative behind this study, incidentally, has some significant commentary about Internet use in Canada:

Though neither the United States nor Canada practices widespread technical Internet filtering at the state level, the Internet is far from “unregulated” in either state.¹ Internet content restrictions take the form of extensive legal regulation, as well as technical regulation of content in specific contexts, such as libraries and schools in the United States. The pressure to regulate specific content online has been expressed in concerns related to four problems: child-protection and morality, national security, intellectual property, and computer security.

Canada continues to be tops among the G7 group of industrialized nations when it comes to relative number of high-speed Internet connections in the country, according to the most recent stats released by the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD).

The OECD measured 23.8 broadband subscribers in Canada per 100 people. But while that was tops in the G7, that was only good enough for ninth spot among the 30 OECD countries. Denmark was tops with 31.9 subscribers per 100 people.

The U.S. was number 15 in the OECD and 5th in the G7 at 19.6 broadband subscribers per 100 inhabitants.

And get this: Japan leads the OECD in fibre connections directly to the home with 7.9 million fibre-to-the-home subscribers in December 2006. Fibre subscribers alone in Japan outnumber total broadband subscribers in 23 of the 30 OECD countries. (!)

My good friend Oxblood Ruffin, the top Canuck in that famous hacker outfit The Cult of the Dead Cow, posts an essay accusing search engine giant Google Inc. of aiding in the cultural genocide of Tibet and asking the Silicon Valley-based company to stand up to the Chinese and lead the way in forcing the Chinese government to eliminate Internet censorship.

“Ever since Google announced that it would deploy its emasculated server farms into Mainland China, the search giant's collaboration with Chinese censors has been widely criticized by the human rights community, free speech advocates, and the United States Congress.  Although Google claims to have consulted with many nameless NGOs before deciding to export its censorship technology to China, it failed to take anyone's advice not to proceed.  Google apparently knew better than its critics.  Google even took the step of hiring
someone from the Council on Foreign Relations to improve its public image with respect to corporate responsibility and geo-strategy.  Regardless, Google's arguments for continuing to capitulate to Chinese demands are misplaced, self-serving, and uninformed.  They are also a threat to Western security interests.

…

It would only take one prestigious IT company to put the government of China on notice and create a chain reaction that could, in time, benefit Tibetans and Chinese alike.  Google has a unique opportunity to match its technical innovations with ethical leadership.  It can respectfully assert its values to the government of China and curtail some of its operations.

Just about everyone on Parliament Hill — MPs, political aides, journalists, and so on — rely heavily on their Research In Motion BlackBerry to communicate. And you never realize how much you depend on the service until it’s taken away. That happened last night around 8 p.m. after an “infrastructure failure” at RIM’s headquarters disrupted service to BlackBerry users in the “Western Hemisphere”, RIM said in a statement.

Party whips use the BlackBerry to summon MPs to the House of Commons for important votes. Last night, MPs were debating whether or not to pass legislation to order striking CN workers back to work. The vote — when whips would require all their MPs to be in the House — would not come until about 10:30 pm and so, while the debate was taking place, many MPs were having dinner or were back in their offices waiting for the BlackBerry message summoning them to the House.

“Of course I didn't get any messages,” Natural Resources Minister Gary Lunn said this morning. “I finally got a phone call — you've got six minutes before the vote.”

“They're just a lifeline right now — to our offices, to constituent, to my blog — so it's extremely disconnecting to lose this little sucker,” said Liberal MP Garth Turner.

BlackBerry service was largely restored to many on the Hill this morning although some staffers and journalists continued to report hiccups with their service.

A new study out of the prestigious Mayo Clinic in the U.S. says cell phones do not interfere with hospital medical equipment, suggesting that the usual bans on cell phone use in hospitals are unwarranted. That said, there are some devices, apparently, that could interfere with medical equipment. Some portable CD players, for example, caused odd ECG readings.

METHODS: Two cellular telephones from different cellular carriers were tested in various patient care areas between February 15, 2006, and June 29, 2006. To monitor the medical devices and equipment in the patient care areas during testing, we observed the device displays and alarms.

RESULTS: Interference of any type occurred in 0 of the 75 patient care rooms during the 300 tests performed. These 300 tests involved a total of 192 medical devices. The incidence of clinically important interference was 0% (95% confidence interval, 0%-4.8%).

CONCLUSIONS: Although cellular telephone use in general has been prohibited in hospitals because of concerns that these telephones would interfere with medical devices, this study revealed that when cellular telephones are used in a normal way no noticeable interference or interactions occurred with the medical devices.

 

The province of Saskatchewan just announced a plan to light up what they say will be Canada’s largest free wireless Internet service. The network will cover the downtown districts and areas around post-secondary institutions of Saskatchewan’s four largest urban areas (Regina, Saskatoon, Moose Jaw, and Prince Albert). Capital costs are pretty cheap — just $1.3–million — and the ongoing annual operating cost is around $330,000.

Notably, the government says that, as this is a public network, “special provisions will be made to prevent access to inappropriate materials.”