Nostalgia for the circa-1993 SGI Indy lab at college prevented me from resisting this $15 bargain at the local recycled computer store. Returning to CRTs after a long time with LCDs makes you appreciate the benefits of not having to worry about horizontal and vertical convergence, as well as drives home just how bright LCD backlight on Glossy screens are.
Though generally pretty sturdy, Apple's MacBook line suffers from a slight design flaw that results in the front-facing edge of the case developing cracks and eventually losing small splinters of black or white plastic. This happens because of the pressure that users' wrists exert on the top of the case, below the keyboard. The outer edge of the top case plate, about 2mm, is much thinner than the surrounding material and is prone to cracking:
This is basically an æsthetic, rather than structural, problem. Nevertheless, there's an entire Flickr Group dedicated to the problem. The consensus seems to be that Apple will replace this part of the case if your laptop is under warranty (or AppleCare.) But for those of us whose computers are beyond the 1-year time limit, there's another option: replace the top case plate yourself.
Facebook introduced some new features last week for their "Pages," which are online entities that typically represent a brand or consumer product. I wrote a few weeks ago about the difference between the new Pages and the older Groups. These new changes extend Pages towards the community-generated-content model of Groups, while still preserving the unique advantages of the Page model. Here are the changes in brief:
1) All new Pages have user-uploaded photos turned on by default. Owners of legacy pages have to enable this new feature manually.
2) Logo images can now be either Flash or FBML (a subset of HTML used in Facebook applications.) For most Page owners, this translates in to being able to embed a small Flash logo or scrolling ticker with news items or photos.
3) Page owners can now ban younger members from visiting if the Page represents a bar or alcohol product.
4) Movable Mini-Feed. I hadn't even noticed this, but apparently the list of recent activity used to be fixed, and is now adjustable to any position on the page.
Of these four changes, the most important is probably #1, the ability of "Fans" to add their own pictures to Pages. This brings Pages closer to the more freeform, community feeling of Groups, and is probably a recognition on the behalf of Facebook that more and more people are setting up Pages when they previously would have set up groups. As I mentioned in my previous post, Groups can't have Applications embedded in them, which makes the addition of RSS feeds and other interactivity very difficult. I know of two organizations that have switched from Groups to Pages just for this ability to add in syndicated content feeds from their existing, extra-Facebook publishing efforts. Now that Pages can reflect more user-generated content in the form of Fan-uploaded photos, there are all the more reasons to go with a Page instead of a Group.
Facebook recently released a new feature designed for companies and charities to set up an online presence called a "Page." There's further detail in the Terms of Use document here.
This new development has left some in Higher-Ed who were early to embrace Facebook in a bit of a quandary. Some may have already set up Facebook Groups, to have a presence on the service and allow thousands of undergraduates to show their affiliation or appreciation for a particular club, sport, facility or service. For example, would an undergraduate library make a Facebook Page to have an official online presence, or would it continue with the Group it set up a year ago? How about the Alumni Association, or for that matter the university as a whole?
An interesting technical feature is the tie-in with the Facebook event stream. So for example if a prospective student becomes a "fan" of a particular university's Page, his or her friends will see that show up in their newsfeed. Or on a more micro level, a grad student confirming attendance at a department conference might broadcast that event to his or her friends via the same system. Facebook is promoting this as "viral spread" of marketing messages for corporate customers, but it's not completely irrelevant for building on-line community in the academic world.
What, then, are the major differences between Groups and Pages?
| Group | Page | |
| Applications | None | Most |
| Active Outreach | Post to Profile |
Post to Profile Send Update to Fans Advertisements |
| Event Invitations | Invite Members | Invite Fans |
| Metrics | None | Comprehensive |
| Control of Associations | Partial | Yes |
While it might seem like a small part of why you would want to set up a presence on Facebook, Applications can actually dramatically enhance your ability to manage your content and provide a compelling experience.
For example, adding in one of the many RSS Reader Applications enables you to leverage the content updates you are probsuitableably already doing on your &privileged;main" online presence. Why bother cutting and pasting when RSS can do the work of syndicating the content on your Facebook Page? Here's an RSS Application installed on a Facebook Page that supplies an active, constantly-updated list of grants and fellowships from a MySQL database with a MovableType front end installed on depts.washington.edu. If a grant's deadline or description changes, the data is brought automatically up-to-date through the same workflow processes already in place for the website.
Facebook Groups cannot contain Applications, meaning you're forced to copy-and-paste content rather than use RSS. In addition, you miss out on all the other functionality of Apps — such as Zombies.
When you want to bring attention to your Facebook presence, you have more options with a Page than with a Group. Group updates are pretty much dependent on either 1) members taking an active interest in the group by visiting regularly, and/or 2) members' personal News Feed settings being configured to show sufficient updates from the a group.
Neither variable is under the control of the group owner. In the latter case, there is no guarantee that your members haven't configured their News Feed to the following setting:
This may result in your members being uninformed about what's going on in your group. Worth noting here is that the precise interplay between these sliders and the kind of information displayed is not well-documented. In addition, the sliders represent a relative proportion between competing kinds of information streams. If a user has no other activity to report at all, it's possible Group updates will appear in the absence of anything else suitible. Regardless, what's clear is that even in a best-case scenario, Groups must compete against a number of other information streams.
Facebook Pages, on the other hand, support a new kind of notification within the informational ecosystem: Updates. These updates stand alone and are much less likely to get lost in the stream of friend updates and other kinds of notifications.
These appear in a special subsection of your users' inboxes, helping segregate it out from the rest of the messages that users may be receiving on Facebook
As Fan Pages are newer and not as widely-known as other, earlier features such as Profile Pages and Events, it's safe to say that Page Updates have a priveledged position in the otherwise-overwhelming flow of updates and notifications in Facebook. An actual Update looks like this:
Interestingly enough the Fan Updates contain tools that empower recipients to either "opt out" of further updates from your Page, or even "report spam." Users can also specify which of the Pages of which they are Fans can notify them -- in essence, an opt-out feature.
Facebook Pages — but not groups — can also utilize the built-in demographic information on users to create micro-targeted ads. If a campus group wanted to hire a part-time undergraduate programmer, for example, they could reach only that target audience:
Other uses for social advertising might include drumming up enrollment in small, specialized classes -- departments are already spending money on this problem when they print up posters advertising courses and hang them in hallways.
Binding an event to a Facebook Page or Group gives you some more options versus having the event associated only with your personal Facebook Profile. For example, you can utilize the built-in 'mailing list' of Fans or Members as a target for an invitation.
Common to both Pages and Groups is the "address book" interface, which allows you to select all or some of the related members or fans to invite.
Updates as Notification Strategy:
Setting up a Facebook Page, as opposed to a Group, gives you a powerful took in the Update feature to draw attention to content. There is a somewhat fuzzy relationship between the Page-specific Update feature, which is capable of sending a picture, video, event or other item to the fanbase, and these data types' built-in Share feature. One difference is that Events which are pushed in a Fan Update lack the contextual RSVP buttons which a true Event Share features. Here is a Page-bound event which was pushed through the Update system:
Users must click through to the event itself, and the special icon for the event is not shown. In addition, the time shown in the metadata represents when the invitation was sent -- which is usually irrelevant -- rather than the time of the event itself, which is highly relevant to any RSVP decision.
In contrast, here is an event invitation which arrived in the normal fashion, through the baseline Events application.
In addition to a special icon, it features a special AJAX in-line RSVP function:
Facebook Pages alone offer the ability to track who is visiting your page, and how often.
Note that no data is delivered until there are 10 fans signed up, and extensive drill-down on fans is not available until the fanbase hits an (unspecified) number after that. For low-traffic Pages, this renders some of the datamining potential moot.
A strange side-effect of the arbitrary way that Facebook has chosen to present Groups is the Amazon-esque "Related Groups" box. This is presumably the results of an algorithm which measures the groups that your members have joined and prints the results on your group's home page. Here are the related groups for the Official Odegaard Library group, which is the undergraduate library at the University of Washington:
Some of these ("Librarians and Facebook," "Library 2.0") are highly-relevant, but the others are more problematic. What happens to the official UW Library presence on Facebook if 'joke' groups start showing up on? These could potentially include groups such as "I write in library books" or "I've had my bag stolen in Odegaard." There is presently no way for Group owners to rearrange, minimize or turn off this associative-logic feature. Update: thanks to Melissa's comment below, I've realized Group owners can actually turn off the "Related Groups" box. If you want total control over your Facebook presence, Pages are better than Groups.
This picture, courtesy of the Swedish Macfeber site, shows the upcoming support for extended roman characters on Apple's iPod Touch. This is important to iPhone users as many suspect that a future version of the phone's operating system will include many of the new features we're seeing first on the touchscreen iPod.
As you can see from the photo above, pressing and holding on the "A" key pops up a list of A's with different diacritic marks. Prior to this, the only way to get å ä and ö, among other letters, was to actually swap them out for little-used brackets on the iPhone's numeric keyboard.
So far the reaction from Swedes to the input system is negative -- they don't like the idea of Å and Ä being treated as "variants" of A, since to them they're actual honest-to-goodness separate vowels. (Imagine if "V" and "W" were thought of as stylistic variants of eachother, as they are in many Nordic languages, and there was only V on the keyboard.)
What we don't know yet is if Swedish is one of the 14 languages allegedly supported by the iPod Touch's keyboard, the user guide of which claims "iPod touch provides keyboards in 14 different languages." As you can see on the photo above, there is a mysterious "globe" icon that should allow you to switch between two national layouts, for example Swedish and English. Time will tell...
My sister lives in the house from Lost. Sure, it's in inland California rather than in a state of non-Cartesian compliance in the South Pacific, but trust me when I say all of the layout, design and technical infrastructure in this duplex is straight out of a DHARMA orientation film.
Desmond's Hatch, not my sister's house -- I think.
Let's start with the æsthetic, which manages to combine precision 1970s technology with near-tropical levels of floral and faunal overgrowth in a manner unseen since the discovery of The Swan. Just like that (now imploded) research station, what characterizes my sister's house is the astounding level of attempted automation and design vision, which makes the ensuing decline of the property into a state of tropical semi-functionality all the more striking. A few examples:
The outside boasts all manner of ill-advised micro-scale Japanese garden accoutrements, including a great deal of deckwork which only advertises its decorative nature after you put your full weight on it. The resulting see-saw effect in miniature threatens to launch you back onto the suburban cul-de-sac whence you came, as an entire substructure of rotten and/or disconnected supports turns what you thought was a bridge into a deathtrap. This is all the more embarrassing because the wood is exactly four inches over the ground, a river-rock surface that neither myself or my sister has been able to figure out should have water in it or not.
If it's water you want, keep going around the side of the house, past where the ghostly imprints of ersatz Japanese-style light fixtures in the siding testify to prior lighting system, prior to their replacement by renter-friendly floodlights, to the backyard, where you'll find an entire pool and waterfall system partially installed. As far as we can tell, the concrete for this fishpond was poured, the drainage and pumping infrastructure was installed, but no actual water hookup or pump ever made its way to the site. There's something pretty creepy about abandoned swimming pools, but abandoned fish ponds have a decidedly less-threatening and more puzzling vibe. The Mosquito/Malaria Vector Control Patrol in this town, however, takes a dim view of standing water, meaning that any quick'n'dirty attempts to turn this into a reflecting pool won't fly -- there has to be recirculating flow, etc etc. Apparently my sister has conducted Schliemann-esque excavations into the soil, trying to find any kind of water hookup, but the results so far have had more in common with Geraldo's Vault than Lord Carnarvon.
Let's move indoors. Though the various research stations on the Oceanic 815 island may be linked by a closed-circuit television system, they have nothing on the 300Ω flat antenna wire that runs to every room in the house. Words cannot describe the range of emotions you go through when you think you've found a cable jack hiding behind a blank panel, only to discover after lots of effort undoing painted-over screws that you've actually got something more suited to Morse Code than HiDef. When the Wikipedia article says "However, for color television it has been largely replaced by..." you know you've got a problem.
But who really needs TV when you have the miracle of the tropics -- indoors? A BioDone before its time, this house has an interior, uh, dirt pit, in the middle of the living room. This "indoor garden" boasts a tree which, while probably quite charming in 1976, has spent the past 29 years growing just a little too tall for the living room. (For all I know, it started out life as a Bonsai.) Presently, it's more of a threat to the skylight than a comfort to any living creature under 8' tall. If the Dharma initiative was interested in flora instead of fauna, Jack might have been stumbled across this:
My favorite part is the water faucet on the wall, a few feet from the shag carpet. EZ rug shampooing! The wall behind the tree hides the central air conditioner, which gets a room of ones own on on a Being John Malkovich-esque floor of its own.
But the tree pit, despite its overgrown awesomeness, isn't the real reason for this post. That honor belongs to the other decorative abscess in the living room: the Fish Pond.
This aquatic artifact from the age of Aquarius contains the 3rd and 4th roommates, a non-negotiable part of the lease. If these Koi could talk.
The high-security device you see around the perimeter is an effort to protect the two residents of the Koi Initiative from the white-haired and terrible beast which roams the living room, my sister's cat.
When we first were helping my sister move in, there was an oddity which, even in this house full of wonders, stood out: the electrical cords draped across the living room floor to power the pool's recirculating pump:
Elegant this was not. We couldn't quite figure out why, in a house that had everything from a water faucet on the living-room wall to a pool in the floor, the designers would have forgotten to run an electrical outlet over to near the pool, where you'd surely need the juice to prevent the water feature from becoming an internal mosquito breeding ground.
So, taking my inspiration from Locke, I decided to do a little digging.
Sure enough, after pawing through a few inches of woodchips in the living room (there's a sentence I never thought I'd write) I discovered an ancient two-prong extension cord that had been entombed in the dirt a long time ago:
The actual head of the brown extension cord is caked in dirt, making it a bit difficult to discern. The cord disappears into a 1/2" PVC pipe that was embedded underneath a section of concrete flooring. Time to excavate the other edge of the path, in the hopes that the pipe goes straight through:
... and sure enough, there's the other end of the extension cord, terminating in an (unphotographed) two-prong, non-polarized plug. Which turns out to be the whole reason this electrical system was abandoned: at some point (in the what, eighties?) the pump was replaced with a newer, safer version that actually required a safer three-prong grounded connection. And the 1/2" PVC pipe just isn't big enough to allow a 3-prong plug to pass through.
...or is it? Though I'd never undertaken even the most basic of home wiring tasks before, I was sure we could re-use the original, DHARMA-era conduit for the new grounded power source.
This entailed a trip to the town's bizzaro Ace Hardware, which -- being in the middle of an agricultural college -- operates on a General Store model unseen since pioneer wagons last fought their way through Donner Pass. I have a feeling I could have gotten cattle feed and a bushel of oats with my electrical supplies, if I'd looked hard enough. But I walked out with only a "replacement power cord," designed to be used with tools that have lost their original connection (one hopes these aren't often sold to power-saw owners) and thus with a pre-made male connection at one end and a naked set of wires at the other:
This end, in all its unfinished glory, was small enough to inch through the original PVC pipe -- and luckily for us, we had the existing deprecated 2-prong cable there that we could use to pull it through. A quick (if nerve-wracking, despite the fact no electricity had touched this wire in decades) snip decapitated the old extension cord and some cheap masking tape from the move-in expertly (?) secured the new cord (left) to the retiree (right):
In this dramatic action shot, my sister pulls the new grounded wiring all the way through the conduit. Let me tell you, the atmosphere during this operation was as tense as a season finale:
Next to attach the female 3-prong plug to the newly-pulled cable.
Result: an electrical hydra:
... which, once assembled, successfully powers a test IKEA lamp:
After testing the new cord, we hooked up the pump and filter to their new, fully-grounded power source. The living room now has one fewer "death by electrocution/pond drowning" tripwire, but the æsthetics of the TV corner have been immeasurably improved.
The Nokia N75 is a new-ish Symbian OS phone released through an initially-exclusive deal with AT&T in the States. A flip-phone, which is rather unusual for Nokia, the N75 shares much in common with the N76, which is also a clamshell but a more obvious direct RAZR competitor (if not a RAZR knock-off.)
The N75 has the advantage of being a Quad-Band GSM phone, which means it'll work in all overseas GSM markets, plus having the UMTS 2100 band for North American 3G support. (It lacks some of the competing phones' higher-speed HSPDA support, but for most uses UMTS should be just fine.)
Since I first started using Nokia Symbians, the Finnish company has split their line of smartphones between Enterprise E-Series and Consumer N-Series. The former is where you'll find Blackberry-style form factors, whereas the latter is where you'll find music-focused phones -- as well as high-end gadgets like the N93.
As mentioned, the N75 was initially a Cingular (later AT&T) exclusive. Though Nokia is now selling the North American N75 directly to consumers as an unlocked phone, that option comes with a $400 price tag. A cheaper route is to get the N75 through AT&T, either as a new customer or as an existing subscriber near the end of your contract. This method gives you deals between $179 and completely free, depending on which matrix of rebates and service agreements and middlemen you choose to go through.
There're two downsides to the contract approach, hardware and firmware. The hardware is easiest to see: AT&T's N75s are branded "Cingular" on the outside. Usually some form of either official factory case replacement spare parts are available to fix this, or a knockoff grey-market case appears a few months after the phone becomes popular (these are either reverse-engineered by taking molds of official service parts, or in some cases run on the same factory lines during the night by unscrupulous contractors.)
So much for outward appearances. I haven't actually changed my case yet, but what I have spent some time on is fixing arguably the bigger problem: carrier lock and AT&T-specific firmware. The first of these is a restriction in the phone's firmware that allows only AT&T (and Cingular Orange) SIM cards to function. This restriction is understandable, given the fact that AT&T is 'subsidizing' the price of the phone anywhere from $200-$400 off retail price, in return for grabbing you as a subscriber for one or two years. (Of course, AT&T pays nowhere near full MSRP for the N75, especially since these phones have AT&T-specific firmware, but to the consumer the net effect is a discount off retail price.)
The good news here is twofold: 1) There are several legitimate reasons why you might need to unlock this 'subsidy' restriction, and 2) AT&T is actually pretty responsive about giving you the unlock code, especially for long-time customers (since 2002 in my case.) The main reason people want to unlock the phone is to use local SIM cards, often pre-paid, in countries where they're traveling for long enough periods of time that international roaming becomes cost-prohibitive. So for example if I'm in Helsinki for a week for a conference, I might want to spend $20 on a Finnish SIM card that gives me a phone number in Finland (so Finns can call me without dialing internationally) and great calling rates to Finnish phone numbers. Since phonebooks became richer than SIM cards could handle, most devices store their address books on local memory and so all your contacts are accessible despite the SIM swap. In addition, as people start having more and more agenda and calendar data on their smartphones, keeping all that information around while using a different SIM card is more important than ever.
There are differing reports on how easy it is to get a Subsidy Unlock Code from AT&T, but this may be due to the fact that not very many people travel overseas extensively in proportion to AT&T's large customer base: some Customer Service Representatives may just be unfamiliar with the unlock procedures. I was able to get an unlock code for my N75 very quickly, about 2 days after making the request. Once you type the magic unlock string of digits into the phone, you'll see a message saying the phone is no longer carrier-locked. (At this point, you could technically sell the phone on eBay for slightly less than $400, but I can't really imagine anybody doing this unless you had another phone you wanted to use instead and didn't mind getting locked into a 2-year, $1,500 contract for the sake of a $400 profit.)
This brings us to the second half of the firmware issue, which is replacing the customized "Cingular" software that's installed by default on all AT&T-subsidized N75s. There are a few different schools of thought on what's added by the carrier versus the original phone manufacturer, but the issue basically parallels the issue of "crapware" or "trialware" that tends to load down new PC's purchased from consumer-focused vendors such as HP and Sony. In the case of the N75, AT&T has added a bunch of demo programs that expire after 30 days of use or have similar restrictions. Inexplicably, they've added in a redundant email program, in addition to the excellent IMAP4/POP/APOP client that Nokia ships on Symbian, which comes configured for Hotmail, Yahoo, AOL and Bellsouth. They've also commandeered the "Music" function on the phone, including the three buttons on the front faceplate, to apply only to their Cingular-branded music player and online store. On the plus side, they do ship a nice Symbian-native IM client which works with MSN, AIM and Yahoo. However the phone's "theme", or visual identity, has also been modified to a rather retina-scarring Cingular Orange:
The phone starts up and shuts down with a long, loud trailer movie of "Cingular 3G" signal strength bars flying around like Superman. And finally, the Cingular firmware doesn't support A2DP, the protocol for stereo audio over Bluetooth. This is strange omission for a music-centric phone, but it may just be that this feature made it into a later version of the phone's firmware than Cingular chose to customize.
Luckily, there's a way to get rid of all this Cingular-added stuff and restore the phone back to the way the Finns intended. It does required getting the Subsidy Unlock Code, as I mentioned above -- for some reason this controls some variables which we need to have complete access to. Once you have an unlocked Nokia N75 ready, however, the actual process is not that difficult. First, we're going to need a program called Nemesis Service Suite, which allows you to change some low-level attributes of the phone. In particular, we need to change the Product Code from 0527376 (the subsidized Cingular model) to 0541358 (the Unbranded model.)
To do this, start the software and hit "Scan" if your phone doesn't show up at first. Then press "Read" to get the current values from your phone. Then check the "Enable" box next to "Product Code," which tells the software that it's only that field you want to modify. Type the new code 0541358 into the box, and hit "Write."
Now we have a phone which is electronically indistinguishable from the $400 unlocked model that Nokia will sell you -- and thus we can use all of Nokia's software update tools to bring it up to the most recent firmware version.
Although the phone itself has a Update Firmware Over-the-Air function, this struck me as a potentially bad idea given the 70mb firmware size. Instead, I chose to run Nokia Software Updater, a PC application. (You can choose a similar phone such as the N76 -- all that matters is that you get the program downloaded and installed.) Connect up the Pop-port to USB cable that shipped with the phone:
Sure enough, the program recognized my phone as having firmware 10.1.273 and offered to upgrade it to 10.2.055. The actual download of the 70mb firmware took quite a while (perhaps because the app is set to look for a European server?) but with a full battery charge and a solid data cable connection the result was a clear success:
With the N75 reset to its original identity and functionality, it's all set to accompany me to Uppsala where it will receive a Swedish SIM and thus a local phone number.
ADDENDUM 8/28/2007:
I happened to have two different N75's paired to my MacBook, with different firmware versions (Nokia and AT&T.) Mac OS X 10.4.10 lists the following differences between which Bluetooth profiles are exposed:
| 10.1.273 (Cingular) | 10.2.055 (Nokia) |
| SDP Server | SDP Server |
| AVRCP Target | |
| Hands-Free Audio Gateway | Hands-Free Audio Gateway |
| Headset Audio Gateway | Headset Audio Gateway |
| Audio Source | |
| SyncMLClient | SyncMLClient |
| OBEX File Transfer | OBEX File Transfer |
| Nokia OBEX PC Suite Services | Nokia OBEX PC Suite Services |
| Nokia SyncML Server | Nokia SyncML Server |
| OBEX Object Push | OBEX Object Push |
| Dial-Up Networking | Dial-Up Networking |
| Imaging | Imaging |
The obvious differences are the AVRCP Target and the mysterious "Audio Source" profile. The former lays the groundwork for home audio integration, as well as possibly allowing sophisticated interaction between a phone and a A2DP headset. As for what the "Audio Source" profile is, I have no idea -- OS X Tiger doesn't really support A2DP, so it's unlikely that Apple is just calling it that by another name. If I still had my Leopard install running I could see what that returned... or, perhaps I'll see what a more sophisticated 3rd-party service sniffer can discover about the N75.
One thing to note -- though I'm not a huge fan of carriers doing their own firmware, neither is it the case the Cingular/AT&T necessarily "crippled" the N75 from having A2DP. (I'm sure AT&T stores would love to sell marked-up A2DP headphones with as many phones as possible.) What's more likely is that A2DP was either not ready or too buggy in the firmware that AT&T began work on, and after it was they had the problem of how communicate to customers about esoteric technical things like firmware flashing. In any case, I see A2DP as a 'no-fault' exclusion from the subsidized N75, which nevertheless justifies flashing the phone to the latest and greatest from Finland.
ADDENDUM 1/19/2008:
Just updated my MacBook to Leopard (10.5), which exposes one additional service: SIM Access. This is mainly used for automobiles with Bluetooth integration, to allow you to access your phonebook from the in-dash radio/entertainment system. I don't know if this feature was in the Cingular firmware, but I don't remember seeing the menu to enable it.
Most of the technical information about debranding this phone was discovered and publicized in this thread at HowardForums.
My university's central computing group just sent out this warning:
DO NOT CLICK ON ANY LINKS OR GO TO ANY WEB ADDRESSES IN SUCH MESSAGES!
If you do so, your computer is likely to be attacked by sophisticated programs designed to search for weaknesses in your computer's configuration and use them (if found) to inject viruses or bot programs into your computer.
Simply visiting the Web page will cause an attack, even without clicking on anything in the page.
Although up-to-date, well-maintained computers with current anti-virus software are less vulnerable, even they might be infected by such sites.
Because they are simple text, these messages are difficult for anti-virus and anti-spam programs to identify and filter out.
For more information about these emails, please see the following Web page:
http://www.washington.edu/computing/news/postcard_phish.htmlI don't envy the task of educating 40,000 users about computer security, and having received these fake e-postcards myself I know it's an actual attack vector for malware. But what's interesting is the way that the urban legend/misinformation of 2000 (just visiting a site can infect your computer!) becomes the reality of 2007.
From the linked FAQ:
You should be suspicious of ANY email message containing WEB addresses! Anything about the message (wording, colors, graphics, logos, etc.) can be faked. That said, if the message is expected and is like legitimate messages you have received before, it MAY be legitimate.
How long till "DO NOT CLICK ON ANY LINKS OR GO TO ANY WEB ADDRESSES" just in general?
Fyris river at dusk, Uppsala 2004
Since I'm going to be living and working in Uppsala, Sweden next academic year, I haven't yet pulled the trigger on an iPhone. The Apple device is sold locked to AT&T, and efforts to open it up to other GSM carriers haven't yet been successful.
This isn't to say that you can't use an iPhone abroad, however. AT&T has roaming agreements with GSM providers around the world: Vodaphone, Telia and 3 in Sweden. The problem comes when you start to add up the cost of using international roaming on a long-term basis. Let's assume you make a hour worth of phone calls a month (two 1-minute phone calls per day):
Roaming per min: $1.30 × 60mins = $78
The roaming fee is assessed for every minute you talk -- those 450 minutes inherent in your plan don't count for anything.
Our grand total so far: $138 per month, for only an hour's worth of phone calls. For customers out of the country on a long-term basis, AT&T does have a special deal to cut down the cost. This involves signing up for World Traveler. Luckily, Sweden is one of the 20 (only?) countries in this program. You pay an additional fee to get a reduced international roaming rate:
Roaming per min: $1 × 60mins = $60, instead of $78
That's saved us a grand total of $10, but obviously the more you talk (and roam) the better the deal gets, as the $6 monthly fee is balanced out by the 30¢ per minute reduction in roaming charges.
Let's take a look at data next. The iPhone's mandatory $20/month unlimited data plan, which is contained within the $40 Nation 450 minute plan above, doesn't give you anything when you're abroad. You'll be charged 2¢ per kilobyte, which means fetching an email with a 1megabyte attachment costs $20.50. And a streaming YouTube video with a few megabytes of data could turn into a $100 experience. Ouch. I won't even bother adding that to the total as the figures get obscene pretty quickly.
Very recently (as in this week) AT&T started to offer an International Data Roaming Plan for the iPhone:
Free Data: 20megabytes
Data over 20megabytes: ½¢/kilobyte
What's really galling is that the true cost of this extremely limited, metered data service is more like $45/month, since you have to include the cost of the iPhone's mandatory $20/month "unlimited' data which is only good in the USA.
Since the iPhone can't be set to retrieve headers only with either IMAP or POP3 (somebody please correct me if I'm wrong,) and since there are a lot of reports that disabling GPRS/EDGE isn't really exposed as a UI option, the only safe solution would seem to be either not setup email at all, set it up on a special account that nobody knows about and have back-end filters forward important mail to there, and/or disable automatic email checking, relying on a manual email check that you can activate when you know you're on a WiFi hotspot.
The other question going through my head is where there are any "vampire" data services outside of email that suck up data kilobytes without your knowledge. I understand the RSS reader solution for the iPhone is a webpage hosted on Apple's servers, so obviously checking feeds won't trigger an EDGE connection. And apparently the "Stocks" app only updates prices when you launch it. (If I get an iPhone, the only ticker symbols I'm putting are going to be 3G data providers...)
But the Weather widget documentation doesn't say either way. And according to those familiar with the phone, the "Visual Voicemail" system does use the GPRS system to update the iPhone's index of who's called and left you a message. (This surprises me -- I would have thought they would use special machine-readable SMS messages.)
The final piece of the puzzle is those communication forms that lie somewhere between voice and data: SMS and MMS. Luckily the iPhone doesn't support the latter, despite its built-in camera. Unlike my pre-Cingular old AT&T plan, which offered free incoming messages (a boon for services such as Dodgeball,) the 'new' AT&T apparently treats incoming as part of the same limited number: 200 for the Nation 450 plan. At least incoming are counted as part of those 200 when abroad -- outgoing are an additional 50¢ each.
But that's just the technological aspect of the SMS system, not the social. Presumably Europeans will be paying a bunch more to send an SMS to my American phone number, which is a somewhat unfortunate disincentive. And with metered (and expensive) data, checking email or webmail is not the workaround for pay-per-text SMS systems that it otherwise would be.
So let's sum this all up: I'm looking at $151/month for a phone that with an hour of talktime, 20 megs of data transfer, and an American area code that makes it extremely inconvenient for Swedes to call or SMS me on. (Of course, given how much calls cost a minute, the fewer conversations I have on the iPhone the better.) On the plus side, the same number I've had since 2003 will continue to work, and Americans can reach me by dialing a 206 number.
What might be the deciding factor is the range and ubiquity of university/private WiFi networks in Uppsala. My researcher apartment is right next to a Waynes Coffee, which is sort of the Starbucks of Sweden, complete with tie-in to 802.11 provider (Telia Homerun in this case.) And as the above link shows, the Uppsala academic wireless network looks to be well-developed and present in a wide variety of academic buildings.
So the question remains: just how much money, and how little functionality, is it worth to send the gadget-obsessed Swedes into fits of envy?
Footnote: Though linked above (as "Ouch,") I wanted to give some extra mention to Felix Salmon's excellent write-up of the trauma of iPhone international roaming. Though I found his post about 80% of the way through writing this one, he has the best and clearest survey of what the lay of the land is for international roamers with this phone right now. He's also got some great tips on how to use the phone with WiFi as the main (or only) data connection.
This was postpended to an invite request from someone on LinkedIn, a social networking site with a focus on professional and corporate connections:
Fact: More people have joined LinkedIn than live in Sweden
Is that some kind of vague threat? Or a prediction for the future? It's hard to believe that an affiliative lifestyle choice like creating a profile on LinkedIn is in anyway comparable to being born in northern Europe...
Bio
Peter LeonardFulbright Fellow & Guest Researcher at Uppsala University's Centre for Multiethnic Research.
Graduate student in Swedish Literature at the University of Washington.
During Spring 2007, I was an exchange student in Nordic Literature at the University of Copenhagen as a Scan|Design Fellow, where I also interned at Museum Tusculanums Forlag, the University Press.
