So, I got a shiny new iPhone (for facilitating office 2.0’s Unconference) but I can’t get it to work yet.
I have MetroPCS – the ‘ghetto phone’ for those of you who don’t know it works like this – you buy the handset, you pay them your monthly fee on time or they turn your phone off. You have unlimited local and long distance calling. SIMPLE. No bill’s, no rolling min, just a phone that works. The catch – your phone only works in your metro area. This is why I have another number (from T-Mobile) that I pay by the min for when I travel to different cities.
So I went to sign up for the new iPhone via my computer. It won’t just let me get an account. I have to get ‘pre-approved’ credit from an AT&T store. To be honest I have not done a lot to get ‘credit’ so I am not surprised. I don’t have a credit card. I don’t have a loan for a car or anything.
My husband and I went to the AT&T store so that I could piggy back on his account/credit and get a phone activated. I decided I would try and port my number. They want to know not only my phone number but my ‘account number’ (remember I have the ghetto phone plan – no bills no nothing that I see an ‘account number’ on). They also want to know my address in their records AND my name. I have this feeling that when I got this phone 4 years ago that I had a different address and I was still going by my maiden name. These things are all not ‘persistent’ I am not sure what their records say and if I don’t know I must not be me right?
All I knew and all they put in their system was my phone number. I get this phone call from them asking me to call them back and give them more information so they can port my number for me.
I am thinking it is all to much trouble and I should get a Grand Central number and a new number from them and tell everyone my grand central number.
Anyone have any thoughts on their service to date or making this kind of choice. With Google acquiring them they are not going to go out of business any time soon.
Technology
Cel phone Forensics Kit…for all your personal spying needs.
My husband recently got a new free phone from his cell phone company (because his 600 treo finally bit the dust).
While searching around for the wires needed to connect his phone to his mac…He noticed this little $3000 gadget the ‘secure view kit for forensics’.
Secure View for Forensics is the ultimate software and hardware solution which provides law enforcement, corporate security and forensics consultants with logical data extraction of the content stored in the mobile phone. Investigators can now gain access to vital information in seconds without the need to wait for crime reports.
There is this nice little note at the bottom of the page:
Note: Features other than Phonebook Manager are based on phone model (check phone support before purchase). DataPilot product family is for personal use only. You can connect and transfer data to a maximum of 8 different handsets.
From the Web 2.0 World
I spent a lot of today looking through my ‘tech’ feeds (yes I have an RSS reader going again) and found some interesting posts….
You Departed – so you can leave messages for your family after you die from Tech Crunch
Identity Theft targets pedigree poodle from Boing Boing
Why Open Source Software is Social Media from James Governor’s Monkchips
Their has been an interesting conversation about the word and meaning of ‘USER” in the software world.
Thomas Vander Wal – Still Throwing Out the User
Tech Crunch – Long Live the User
Charlene Li – observations from the ‘user’ debate
The DHS secret list of buildings you can’t photograph from Boing Boing.
Blackberry vs iPhone on TechCrunch
OR
This really cute parody video
Community Organizer #1 Job of the Future by Seth Godin
House Cats and their Domestication History on Boing Boing.
Ikea opens hostel for shoppers in Norway on Boing Boing
User Agent's Spotted at Supernova
I had a good time overall at supernova. I found two user-agent’s.
Well what is a user-agent? they are programs that work on the users behalf. I found this definition on Dr. K’s Blog:
it would seem that “user-centric” identity is about creating an “agent-in-the-middle” architecture for identity systems. An agent (usually automated) for the user sits in the middle of the identity flow, analyzing the flow request and determining how to handle the response. The determination would be based on policies defined by the user. It may require the agent to bring the user in for an explicit approval, or it may automatically approve or reject the flow based on previous user preferences (similar to the user checking the box that says “do not ask me again”). It may also apply a configured rule or policy to the identity flow that determines the action to take – ask user, approve, reject.
So who were these agents? One was WiMoto – when I fist talking to Scott Redmond he was explaining his tool…and I just didn’t like it..about advertising on my phone etc…THEN all of a sudden I ‘got it’ – I said “oh this is cool you have a user-agent.” I explained what it was from our ‘user-centric identity’ perspective. He was like sure I guess what is that we have. I met him early in the evening of a cocktail party where he would be demoing throughout. At the end he said he was eternally indebted to me for giving him that word “user-agent”. Apparently it let him communicate effectively to the other folks all night. It is now on the front page of their website. I still don’t get exactly how it works though.
The second user-agent I found was MyStrands – it is a mobile social networking app for night clubs. So you can text to the screen when you are in shared space together (like at the night club). It also lets you opt in to get information about the bands and clubs. So it is a promotion network. They look like their are going some where!
Women In Tech
While surfing around the women in tech world I found this statistic on Ubuntu Women.
An EC funded study (2006) summarized in the Flosspols report, indicates that about 1.5% of FLOSS community members were female, compared with 28% in proprietary software. The Ubuntu Census Survey (June 2006) also reflects a similar female ratio with 2.4% women actively volunteering in the Ubuntu community.
I understand we are not an ‘open source community’ but I think we do have fewer women then the 28% in corporate tech. I was struck at AOL two weeks ago how many women were there. I wonder why more women from the corporate world don’t come to events like IIW and other tech conferences.
I hope that we can continue to improve the number of women participating in Identity. In the hallway of IIW I came across a little pod of three women I have never before seen at an IIW event – this was great! I hope that along with being proactive in inviting various interested communities to the next IIW we can also reach out to respected women who could contribute to the conversation.
Tinfoil Hat for WoW … When is it coming to First Life?
Identity issues in Virtual worlds are interesting. World of Warcraft an online Massive Multiplayer Online Game MMOG recently launched “The Armory”
a vast searchable database of information for World of Warcraft – taken straight from the real servers, updated in real time, and presented in a user-friendly interface. Since the Armory pulls its data from the actual game servers, it is the most comprehensive and up-to-date database on the characters, arena teams, and guilds of World of Warcraft in existence.
This needles to say freaked some folks out enough that Blizzard has chosen to address “player aversion to the Armory…by adding a new item, the Tinfoil Hat.”
The Burning Crusade added an abundance of new profession recipes and player-created items to World of Warcraft. One of these brand-new items is the Tinfoil Hat. While the Tinfoil Hat provides the wearer with added protection against mind control and other befuddlements, the hat’s most interesting and truly unique property is that it completely removes the wearer’s character profile from the Armory website and provides enhanced privacy for its wearer!
Now if we could only do that with our digital records.
http://games.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=07/04/01/1414240
New Blog on ASN emerges
Subjectivity – mapping the world of digital identity is a blog that has just sprung up to
This site has been created to document the evolution and context of several ongoing initiatives related to the Augmented Social Network and the Social Web. Watch this space!
So far that is the only post but it has a great set of core pages with links and books. Digital Identity, Social Capital, Technology and Media, Emergence and Evolution, Organizational Learning, Global Governance, Strategic Culture.
Sheep Phone
OpenID Going Mainstream
OpenID made the front page of the Money Section of USA Today – Today.
From the community they quote, David Recordon, Scott Keveton, Brad Fitzpatrick, and Kim Cameron.
SAN FRANCISCO — An emerging technology standard could be the answer to a major headache: It lets consumers use the same user name and password for hundreds of websites that require a sign-in.
What an exciting day!
AOL launches cool OpenID enabled App: Ficlet
Yesturday walking through the exhibit hall at SXSW the AOL Principle Product Managerd Micheal Cummins came up to me and said he had to show me this new OpenID enabled app – Ficlets.
It is a really cool idea – you get to start a story by writing a ficlet and other people get to continue it. The first thing that came to my mind was the fact that you could end up with collaboratively created Choose your own Adventure style stories.
The other thing that this makes clear is that someone inside AOL has read the Innovators Dilemma/solution and is supporting a creative culture within the company. With this I look forward to seeing what other cool apps/features emerged and how they can play in cultivating an thriving OpenID ecology.
Designing Experience is relevant to Identity
Stop Designing Products was the name of the presentation by Peter Merholz from Adaptive Path.
I think the content of this talk is really important for us identity folks to think about. This past week I have been thinking about my own reason for being in identity as a field – because I wanted to support people being able to do things they couldn’t do without an identity layer. The core building blocks of the technology are finally here and their diffusion is beginning. So, this has got me thinking about what I would like to see built and how I want to contribute to projects building these things.
Yes after three years in this industry and starting out with a product project needed identity (but it didn’t exist). I do have some visions for products or perhaps more accurately visions of user experience that use identity that would be fun to manifest now that tools exist.
So back to the presentation at hand – Designing Experience.
It began with a sharing of some product development history – of the Kodak Camera and how they had a guiding star – You take the picture we will do the rest.
Triangle
POINT: Experience (cut to the point)
MIDDLE: Features (pile them on)
BASE: Technology (something you couldn’t do before)
Lesson: Start from the Experience
TiVo is an example.
Products are People Too
They Know Who they Are
(They are not trying to be something they are not)
As Designers and Programmers we think like this about products
data (Center)
logic (outside center)
user-interface (outer ring)
Data outward ->
But
They see the user-interface (Magic)
Outside In ->
He referenced Designing from the outside on O’Reilly Radar.
Experience Strategy
(collective shared by many people across many platforms)
You press the button and we do the rest. (Kodak)
Google Calendar – they had a vision…
Carl Sjogreen, Product manager)
Now they are nipping on the heals of Yahoo! Calendar.
Leapfrog potential when Experience Design.
Have a Star to sail ship by.
About Flickr has some good ones that are a filter for all decisions
Deliver on cohesive experience strategy.
THE EXPERIENCE IS THE PRODUCT.
Web 2.0 quotes – overheard at eTel.
Every time you say Web 3.0 another startup dies.
Tricorder information
So we thought we had problems with RFID chips floating around. Well just wait until these little gadgets can start scanning us. This is coming up now I am going through my notes from the past 6 months in my little black book and finding out about all sorts of little things. I took this note down while at OSCON talking to people about the cool things from the prior year’s FooCamp. This was what Susan Crawford had to say about it.
Scott Gray (ex-LearningLab) has a couple of things to talk about. (I’m sure he has many things to talk about — he’s irrepressible and superlative by nature.) First, he wants to tell us about what he thinks is the BEST TECHNOLOGY EVER.
What is it? It’s using spectrum that we have trouble generating (terahertz gap spectrum, between microwave and infra red) that can bounce through materials safely and tell us what’s inside. He’s telling us that organic materials resonate at these frequencies. So you can point a reader (a tricorder) at yourself and see whether you have cancer, or a virus, or you can point at a road and see whether there’s a bomb buried there. The detector technology for this spectrum is very advanced, but it’s expensive and difficult (right now) to generate the waves. There’s a company that is working hard on this, and Scott thinks there’s a huge future here.
He notes that Star Trek gave us the communicator, and Get Smart the slamming doors — this will be a Star Trek device that we’ll carry around.
Then he switches gears and talks about online education. He’s into training people how to program by putting a lot of effort into technology (so they have a live terminal view of their environment) and not that much into teachers. Teachers can be coaches, answering queued-up questions. Students can be exploring, education can be cheap, and it can all be constructive. No simulations, no self-grading, and lots of interaction between teacher and student. No one-sided lectures (he got some reaction here from people who pointed out that we got interested in his first topic because he told us about the Star Trek link; context and scaffolding helps). He’s working hard on how to educate asynchronously.
Sneaker Tracking
However, it turns out that the transmitter in your sneaker can be read up to 60 feet away. And because it broadcasts a unique ID, you can be tracked by it. In the demonstration, the researchers built a surveillance device (at a cost of about $250) and interfaced their surveillance system with Google Maps. Details are in the paper. Very scary.
Cool new wiki feature
I went through TechCrunch today as I do on a weekly basis to check out what is new in web2 land. Lots of kids building interesting things but I kind of think mmmm…to a lot of them. Also lots of acquisition rumors. By the end of it I wondered why me? Why this industry almost completely devoid of meaning in a particular way.
The one cool ting that I did find was a new feature called “UnPlug” for SocialText Wiki’s so you can get a section of a wiki you want to edit on your computer and work on it ofline (say on a plane ride) and then when you plug back in it is uploaded. VERY COOL.
Finally the iPhone is coming
I have been waiting and waiting for 2 years. I kept with my gheto phone Nokia just because it worked and I have the flat fee pay by the month plan so I can manage my celphone costs.
The word on the street is the iPhone is coming this winter. I am sooooooooooo excited. I trust them to do UI right. (I also trust Nokia BTW).
Web 2.0 – at WITI they forgot that means WIFI in the conference rooms.
Robin Raskin ‘the internet mom’ has a site called Raising Digital Kids and blogs for Yahoo! Tech. She lead the ‘What is web 2.0?’ panel. She did a great job of helping orient the mostly ‘I work in large corporate IT’ folks. The woman who worked for Microsoft highlighted that it was a way of thinking in response to the people who wanted to ‘get the tools.’
Apparently it is a way of thinking the folks at WITI (Women in Technology International) have not picked up on yet. There is no wifi here except for ‘in the lobby’ that you have to pay $10 for and it has no outgoing SMTP [Why do you pay $10 and still not have working outgoing email tell me that tmoblie].
I knew the sessions here would be marginally interesting to me but that I would have a fine day listening while I kept up with e-mail, blogged and did my every day stuff. I also sort of naively thought their might be opportunities to interact with and connect to the women here but it seems to be all talking heads panels (it makes me long for an unconference). I will get my fix of those in the next two weeks as I facilitate both Startup Camp and Ruby on Rails Camp. Johannes and I are going to lead a session at Startup Camp on Identity on Friday morning in the second session.
During the session:
NO one has a computer open….
and No one cares there is no internet
These were the statistics for usage of the following tools in a room of 100.
- Digg(5),
- Flickr (3),
- Wikipedia (3) 1/2 use it to look stuff up
- Del.icio.us (6)
Anyways. This group has a ways to go to get hip with the latest in technology. I just spoke with Robin Raskin and she said the audience is 1/2 corporate types and 1/2 independent both of which need to know about the lastest stuff because it is changing everything rapidly.
Card Space Resources
Craig Burton points people to a list of links from MSDN for those who want to know more about CardSpace.
e-passports cloned…
This was on Wired yesterday (posted on Slashdot). I think it highlights the importance of thinking deeply about how these proposed identity systems work. The other security flaw is the ‘integrity’ of the databases that the passport system is built on.
A German computer security consultant has shown that he can clone the electronic passports that the United States and other countries are beginning to distribute this year.
The controversial e-passports contain radio frequency ID, or RFID, chips that the U.S. State Department and others say will help thwart document forgery.
“The whole passport design is totally brain damaged,” Grunwald says. “From my point of view all of these RFID passports are a huge waste of money. They’re not increasing security at all.”
Grunwald plans to demonstrate the cloning technique Thursday at the Black Hat security conference in Las Vegas.
The United States has led the charge for global e-passports because authorities say the chip, which is digitally signed by the issuing country, will help them distinguish between official documents and forged ones. The United States plans to begin issuing e-passports to U.S. citizens beginning in October.
Although countries have talked about encrypting data that’s stored on passport chips, this would require that a complicated infrastructure be built first, so currently the data is not encrypted.
“And of course if you can read the data, you can clone the data and put it in a new tag,” Grunwald says.
The cloning news is confirmation for many e-passport critics that RFID chips won’t make the documents more secure.
“Either this guy is incredible or this technology is unbelievably stupid,” says Gus Hosein, a visiting fellow in information systems at the London School of Economics and Political Science and senior fellow at Privacy International, a U.K.-based group that opposes the use of RFID chips in passports.
Open Standards have interesting consequences…anyone can use them… it also highlights the need to have ‘social’ fabric underlying any identifier system/network.
Grunwald says it took him only two weeks to figure out how to clone the passport chip. Most of that time he spent reading the standards for e-passports that are posted on a website for the International Civil Aviation Organization, a United Nations body that developed the standard. He tested the attack on a new European Union German passport, but the method would work on any country’s e-passport, since all of them will be adhering to the same ICAO standard.
How did he do it?
- Grunwald then prepared a sample blank passport page embedded with an RFID tag by placing it on the reader — which can also act as a writer — and burning in the ICAO layout, so that the basic structure of the chip matched that of an official passport.
- As the final step, he used a program that he and a partner designed two years ago, called RFDump, to program the new chip with the copied information.
- The result was a blank document that looks, to electronic passport readers, like the original passport.He obtained the reader by ordering it from the maker — Walluf, Germany-based ACG Identification Technologies — but says someone could easily make their own for about $200 just by adding an antenna to a standard RFID reader.
Why it is a security failure…
The demonstration means a terrorist whose name is on a watch list could carry a passport with his real name and photo printed on the pages, but with an RFID chip that contains different information cloned from someone else’s passport. Any border-screening computers that rely on the electronic information — instead of what’s printed on the passport — would wind up checking the wrong name.
People Tracking for Advertising goes high Tech
This head line explains it all. they’re-in-the-phone dept. the WSJ is reporting that Integrated Media Measurement Inc. is creating a device that will sample peoples environment every 30 seconds for sounds to determine what ‘messages’ and ads they are being exposed to.
Just wait until it isn’t just that they are tracking.
A few emerging techs at emerging tech
The first full day of ‘conference’ opened with the best ’emerging tech’ we were to see all day. It was a late addition to the program and happened because Tim saw him at TED. (so much for the submission process). Jeffery Han shared the touch table interface for the computer. This is actually sexy technology – sensual and very embodied.
We had Artificial Artificial Intelligence with Amazon’s Mechanical Turk – basically it is micro-outsourcing to india (as far as I can tell) and yesturday R0ml in keeping with presentation as performance art said what they were up to at Root was Artificial artificial artificial intelligence.
IBM presented the enterprise mashup Wiki that looked cool. (apparently in the article I linked to Mashosphere is now a word)
Clay had Hobbs and Rousseau argue about Dave Winer to articulate the need to develop a pattern language for moderation. This is to address the Freedom to Annoyingness curve of online community space. This is vital to supporting the encoding bargain we are making with social tools about freedom of speech.
There was Playsh that was like MUD text searching on the web (I think)
Yesturday for keynotes you had two talks that were way to short. The Real Nature of the Attention Economy and George Dyson’s history lesson on the visions of web 2.0 that go back 160 years.
Mary Hodder presented on itags followed by Dana Boyde on Glocalization and what happens we we mash global and local together. It was a great articulation of some anthro and ethnography for the geeks to get what online community is about. (i will post details later)
The best study people do something cool application has to be Reep’s Trampoline Collaboration Platform. From his research of on one of the scilly island’s St Agnes. They have only 80 residents.
Last night they had a mini-maker faire it was really fun. Glowing clothing, roomba cock fights, “new” attari games,