It turns out that the company sporting the motto “don’t be evil” has been asking parents nationwide to disclose their children’s personal information, including Social Security Numbers, and recruiting schools to help them do it — all under the guise of an art contest. It’s called, “Doodle-4-Google,” a rather catchy, kid-friendly name if I do say so myself. The company is even offering prize money to schools to enlist their help with the promotion. Doesn’t it sound like fun? Don’t you want your kid to enter too?
What could be wrong with filling out a few entry forms?
A national, commercial database of names and addresses of American children, especially one that includes their dates of birth and SSNs, would be worth many millions to marketing firms and retailers.
You see what Google knows and many parents don’t know is that a person’s city of birth and year of birth can be used to make a statistical guess about the first five digits of his/her social security number. Then, if you can somehow obtain those last four SSN digits explicitly — voila, you’ve unlocked countless troves of personal information from people who didn’t even understand that such a disclosure was happening.
So in closing, three simple ideas for you, gentle reader, to take away. (1) City of birth, when coupled with year of birth, can be correlated to social security numbers, so don’t give it out just because a box appears on a form. (2) No public contest should ask for any part of a social security number, especially involving kids. (3) For internet searches, have you tried Yahoo! or Bing lately? (They’re probably both improved since you last tried them.) You just might find what you’re looking for.
To me, the most interesting thing about it is the pairing. Well, after the question of whether or not it exists, of course. Anyway, I find this design philosophy really intriguing, because the design philosophy of an artifact often finds its way into many or most of the artifact’s details. And here, the pairing is arguably the most striking element of RIM’s design philosophy for the device, so it has the potential to lead the device in a lot of interesting directions.
Let’s compare this thing to the iPad: the PlayBook is the phone’s big sibling, whereas the iPad is the desktop’s little sibling.
It’s all about the pairing, in my opinion. The iPad is (currently) useless without an OSX-based machine to pair it to, at least at initialization. The big sibling to which you attach it provides backups and, at least initially, all of the authentication and personal information needed. This may change in the near future (evidently the device will soon get the ability to print documents, for example—woo!). But currently, it is a slave device. A really cool, easy-to-use, remarkably powerful slave device, but a slave nonetheless.
The PlayBook is paired to the phone: it is a big sibling. If RIM allows this philosophy to pervade their design decisions, then the device has serious potential to be powerful in ways that the iPad (currently) is not. The iPad is currently not designed to be a standalone computer, and I believe much of that is due to its little-sibling status. The PlayBook could potentially attract some market attention away from the iPad if the big-sibling status becomes their rallying point … make this device the functional equivalent of a laptop (in terms of capabilities), and you’ll make a lot of people very happy.
I have an iPad. I love using it, and my kids fight each other to use it. However, I have not yet purchased an iPad for my parents, because it is not the equivalent of a standalone laptop/desktop yet … you can’t print from it, you can’t Skype on it, you can’t backup its contents without tethering it to a host computer, etc. It will be interesting to see how many of these issues RIM addresses with the gen1 version … when/if it comes out.
What I find particularly humorous is that the last little bit is not exactly the endorsement that the author intended. When invoking the moniker of Google’s most awesomest handset evar, let’s just first recall how well the Nexus One sold in its opening week (graph stolen from Wired.com):
When you subtract out the units that were given away as promos, I think over all Google sold around forty Nexus Ones over the product’s lifetime. So comparing the tablet’s future to that of the Nexus One may doom it.
Another thing I find humorous is the promo shot of the tablet:
It’s computer generated (self-admittedly, but still …). The tablet is expected to show up in stores in three months, and yet no photos of it exist? Words fail me. This thing is probably real, and it may turn out to be the best thing since sliced bread … but come on, guys.
Every now and then, we remove applications from Android Market due to violations of our Android Market Developer Distribution Agreement or Content Policy. In cases where users may have installed a malicious application that poses a threat, we’ve also developed technologies and processes to remotely remove an installed application from devices. If an application is removed in this way, users will receive a notification on their phone.
… and this particular blog entry let the world know that they had just exercised that feature on every Android phone out there hosting a particular app. Let’s put this in perspective: Apple removes apps from the App Store (and is branded “evil” for doing so); Google removes apps from their version of an App Store (the Android Market), and also removes apps directly off of your personal phone.
The fact that they have done this is far less disturbing than the fact that they put in place the hooks to do it in the first place. They have a back door in every single Android phone out there … a back door that allows them to control your phone. They say that the reason is for your security:
The remote application removal feature is one of many security controls Android possesses to help protect users from malicious applications.
However, history shows that malicious things are often done in the name of increased security. Also, the “one of many” quote above is kinda ominous to me.
Anybody know if Apple has a similar feature in the iPhone?
Some great quotes and perspective from episode 1 follow.
The division of labor and the Designer
Toward the middle of the video, they venture into the creation of the Designer, which happened as a byproduct of the Industrial Revolution … the maker and the designer became two separate entities, with potentially bad side-effects for the maker.
Dieter Rams (designer from Braun & others):
My grandfather, he was a specialist for surfaces … I learned from him to polish by hand, and his thumb was like his tool … he was thinking not in mass[-manufactured] products, and that is what what we have to think today, too; we have to change mass[-manufactured] products into quality products.
This clearly points to the goal of the modern designer, the desired end-product: the modern designer should create something that is compatible with today’s manufacturing techniques and capabilities, but which emulates the hand-crafted nature of the individually created product.
Narrator voiceover, talking about the future of manufacturing, given Rams’s observation:
But controlling a multi-faceted manufacturing process is more challenging than throwing a pot on a wheel. Designing for industry is based on a bold premise: that the craftsman’s skills can be replicated by a mechanical system in which machines act like humans, and humans [act like] machines.
This introduces the unpleasant side of the divide between the maker and the designer. The maker becomes a cog in a machine.
Bob Casey, Historian at the Henry Ford Museum:
What happens in a mass-production system is that the craftsmanship is transferred from the people who are physically assembling the product back up the chain away from the mass who are doing the assembly. The labor historians have a word for it: they call it ‘de-skilling.’ It says we are going to take the skill away from the majority of people, and were going to invest it in a smaller group of people who are designing [the product].
The obvious difficulty is how to avoid things like sweatshops and working conditions in which workers routinely throw themselves off buildings [insert sidelong glance at Apple & Foxconn]. The Henry Ford approach seems the most obvious … odd that so few seem to have emulated it. Ford turned his employees into his customers by paying them wages high enough that they could afford to buy a car of their own.
The problem was seen back when the industrial revolution began. Fiona MacCarthy, WIlliam Morris Biographer (after narrator voiceover “For William Morris, the most celebrated and influential designer of the 19th century, machines were at best a threat; at worst a menace.”):
He wasn’t against machines per se, because he could see that machines could, if properly regulated, make life better for people. But he couldn’t bear the thought of this beauty being achieved at the expense of the people who were producing in these inhumane conditions.
A beautiful object really must be made in beautiful surroundings by people who are living reasonable lives, lives with some pleasure in them … not the kind of lives that a lot of people in Victorian England were being forced to live and work in.
To address what he saw as the problem, Morris learned all of the crafts & skills that the machines were taking away from people … he believed that these were skills required by the designer — necessary for the designer to do his job properly. Evidently, he never managed to address the problem … because his works had significant hand-crafted aspects to them, they cost more and were thus relegated to the wealthy who could afford them.
The unadorned beauty of the everyday
There is a great section on the marriage of form and function, of beauty and purpose.
Sam Hecht, designer:
Design can never be a pure activity, because it’s always connected with how things are bought, how things are sold, how things are used, how things are thrown away or recycled. All of these different aspects of how consumption operates need to be acknowledged, understood, and sometimes manipulated so that you can create beautiful, resolute, astounding pieces of work.
The video goes on to point out that Japan, despite its rapid and whole-hearted acceptance of modernization and mass manufacturing, nonetheless as a culture appreciates and, as a consumer society, pays for hand-crafted high quality work on everyday objects. Things like teapots and teacups … quality hand-made items are sought after, and the objects carry price tags high enough to enable the artist/craftsman to continue crafting the object for the future. This is a culture that appreciates, recognizes, and rewards quality, all in the face of mass manufacturing.
Naoto Fukusawa, designer:
The Japanese see beauty in the functionality of an item, like tools and other everyday items. We place great emphasis on harmony and being at one with the world … We want products to melt into the environment and become one with it. The goal for us is creating harmony.
The interesting question is how to instill this attitude outside of the Japanese culture. Europe seems to have an appreciation for quality, though I do not know the extent to which it mirrors that of Japan. America, on average, has an appreciation only for price … and we use it to distinguish all goods from food to medicine to clothing to house construction. Scary.
On the frequent mental divide between function and appeal, specifically targeting the automobile industry:
For designers, the chassis is the platform, which exists to support their designs.
For engineers, design is styling, sometimes pronounced “packaging.”
Pretty humorous; it mirrors the divide between hardware and software engineers that I wrote about for a business article a while back:
Last but not least, a great quote from Steven Bayley, writer:
There are three great and significant 20th-century art forms, I think: the one is the movies; the second is rock music; the third is industrial design, of which the automobile is the paradigm.
The piece spends a bit of time talking about Ford and the demise of the Model T, brought down by its own success (Ford became less an automobile manufacturer and instead a Model-T manufacturer), and there are some great quotes from designers at the company today.
A single, perfect sphere
It is clear that the challenges are two-fold: first, designers must make pieces that, despite their production numbers and the techniques used to produce them, retain the same essence of humanity inherent in a hand-crafted object. Second, the manufacturing processes (or, perhaps more appropriately, the manufacturing environments) must not dehumanize the workers. We as consumers must insist on these via the decisions we make with our wallets. It certainly seems possible to achieve both; Ford’s example shows that it is possible to leave profit (sometimes significant profit) on the table and yet grow or at least sustain one’s company. Happy, healthy, well-paid workers do not equal the impending downfall of a company … but perhaps I am naive.
The solution is typically innovation … when a company can compete on nothing other than price, then exploitation of workers seems an inevitable endgame. On the other hand, when a company competes on innovation, then interesting things can happen. Neat example in the video is the Coalbrookdale bridge:
[Though] mass production complicated ideas of beauty, the [cast] iron bridge in Coalbrookdale is an early testament to the beauty of the machine-made and the truth of the mass-produced.
This is the picture at the top of the post. I love that, with its reflection in the water, the bridge makes a perfect circle.
Great point made in the video: around the time of the industrial revolution, The Design of Things became a separate concept, distinct from The Making of Things. Thus, today, the design of things is as important as was the making of things 200 years ago. Looks like it is a series—way cool.
Okay, so I bought the WIRED edition for iPad, because it just looked too cool, and the page navigation seemed much more intuitive than that of Popular Science (which I still can’t figure out). I loved it for the first hour or so. Now I’m over it … this clearly is not the future of digital magazines. Here’s just one little aspect of what’s wrong:
With the Wired app weighing in at a whopping 500 megabytes – just 100 shy of a full CD-ROM – how do they intend to maintain new editions of the magazine? 500 MB is too large for a 3G download (no help from AT&T’s less than spectacular network performance) and for those with iPad’s with the smaller storage, each issue will take a significant chunk of space on the device. […]
Why is the magazine so large? Being the intrepid hacker that I am (*wink*) I mounted my jail broken iPad via AppleTalk and quickly tore into the app itself to see how it was constructed. Similar to the PopSci+ magazine application, each Wired issue is actually a bunch of XML files that lay out a bunch of images. And by “a bunch of images” I mean 4,109 images weighing in at 397MB.
Each full page is a giant image – there are actually two images for each page: one for landscape and one for portrait mode. Yes, I’m laughing on the inside too. There is no text or HTML, just one gigantic image. The “interactive” pieces where you can slide your finger to animate it are just a series of JPG files. When you press play on the audio file and see the progress meter animate? A series of PNG files.
Something is wrong with this picture. Something wrong and something very lazy and/or desperate.
Consumers are definitely missing out when the digital version is simply a recreation of the print version. And, yes, 500MB equals 1/32 of my total iPad storage, an amount that I find completely unacceptable for a single object. Most of which constitutes ads, I should point out, that I paid for.
The guys over at iA do a great job discussing the layout of thing, an essay that transcends WIRED and applies to all content on the iPad:
Most of the problems that I pointed out (column width, font choices, ornaments, the paper metaphor) and many more (unable to copy paste or zoom) seem to be a result of using InDesign, a layout program optimized for paper designs.
Yeah, as I pointed out before, I think there is room for a lot more to be done on this platform.
Aza Raskin, Creative Lead of Firefox, describes a trojan horse attack whereby the scripts on an ostensibly innocuous site wait to see when you have started looking elsewhere (navigate to other tabs, other open windows, etc.), and when this is detected, the content on the site is replaced with a lookalike of a login window for gmail, facebook, online banking, whatever it detects that you use and currently have open. When you “log in” to the service, the site just forwards you to the real site, where you are still logged in as before, so it will appear that you have successfully re-logged in. But now the phishing site has your credentials, and you are none the wiser.
Here’s the money quote:
Every time you include a third-party script on your page, or a Flash widget, you leave yourself wide open for an evil doer to use your website as a staging ground for this kind of attack. If you are the evil doer, you can have this behavior only occur once in a while, and only if the user uses a targeted service. In other words, it could be hard to detect.
Yeah, the point is that your site doesn’t have to be the bad site … if you have a Flash script, say, from an advertiser that you don’t know well, that script could be the one to take over the session. Woo hoo! I agree with his conclusion:
… it’s time for the browser to take a more active role in being your smart user agent; one that knows who you are and keeps your identity, information, and credentials safe.
When I started on Disneyland, my wife used to say, ‘But why do you want to build an amusement park? They’re so dirty.’ I told her that was just the point; mine wouldn’t be.
I love that quote; it shows such depth of personality and drive. I think the attitude really exemplifies the American spirit — e.g., “screw everything, I’m going to do it RIGHT.” It is pretty much the American Grail, the cowboy in everyone. It is what allowed us to pull ourselves up by our collective bootstraps.
So this is clearly one of the main tenets of innovation: the ability to see something as it should be. Of course, doing so, by definition, seems abrasive to others and almost certainly ruffles feathers. Disney’s own wife was skeptical of his plans; think what other people’s reactions were. The computer-buying public nearly revolted when Apple ditched the floppy disk, and they’re now shaking their torches and pitchforks over Flash. Change sucks; radical change inspires revolutions.
What’s embedded in the sentiment, and what I think is at the root of the hostile reaction, is that what most people think is right isn’t always right. What the majority thinks is best sometimes turns out to be wrong. And so the cowboy has to stand up to the majority and tell them they’re wrong. That’s a tough scenario … no wonder it rarely happens.
It is interesting that, despite being infrequent, standing up to the majority seems to happen with regularity in America … in a place where the majority is always quite sure of itself (they choose the nation’s leader, after all, why shouldn’t they feel important?). One would figure it would be easier to stand up to a pliant majority … i.e., that innovation would be more easily accomplished elsewhere.
Or perhaps it is because the majority is so confident that it can produce such visionaries, people who believe in what they think is true, despite external pressure. I like that answer better.
So that’s a theory worth testing … do free societies, in which the populace is enabled and thus confident in its own abilities, innovate more frequently than repressed societies? Food for further thought.
