Salon.com > Simson Garfinkel

When two gadgets become one

Wed, 07 Mar 2001 20:30:00 +0000

Guess what -- convergence is finally here, and it fits in the palm of your hand, courtesy of Handspring. It's the VisorPhone, a new cellular phone half the size of Motorola's venerable StarTAC and weighing just 2.9 ounces. It slides into the back of a Handspring Visor PDA and turns the Palm-compatible organizer into a full-featured cellphone. I've had this phone for more than a month now, and I love it.

Previous attempts at building an integrated cellular telephone and personal organizer have been less than successful. There's the clip-on organizer Motorola created for StarTAC phones. Nokia keeps adding new features to the address book inside its popular cellphones, and a number of companies make programs that will synchronize a phone's address book with your desktop computer. Back in 1999, Sprint introduced the Qualcomm pdQ, a somewhat oversized and disappointing phone that had a keypad that folded down to reveal a Palm III computer.

Java fans fight back

Thu, 18 Jan 2001 19:23:00 +0000

My article last week on Java touched a nerve with readers. After reading the column, more than 100 people clicked the "mailto" link on my byline and let me know precisely how they felt -- and hundreds more wrote angry letters to the editor. I tried to respond to the first 50 or so e-mails. But when the mail kept pouring in after a week, I asked my editor if I could write a response for all to read.

Reactions to the article were mixed, with roughly 40 percent agreeing with my conclusion and 55 percent calling me names, cursing at me with their keyboards and saying that I don't know beans about programming. The remaining 5 percent were the most curious of all -- they said that I pulled my punches, that I wasn't harsh enough on the Java blight.

It's easy to understand how the article could engender such varied responses. Java is a huge industry. There are tens of thousands of companies using Java and hundreds providing tools for the language. And since there is so much disparity between the programmers that are bad at Java and those who are good at it, an attack on Java as a whole can be very threatening to those at the top of the profession. Or as one programmer with a Hotmail account told me, "Here's this for a kicker: I make more than YOU and I'm cutting code in Java! :) Suck on my $200,000/yr as a Java Developer, dumb ass."

Java: Slow, ugly and irrelevant

Mon, 08 Jan 2001 20:30:00 +0000

I hate Java. As a programmer, I hate Java, the language, for what it has done to the field of programming. As a journalist, I hate the relentless hyping of Java by its supporters, as well as their unending excuses as to why Java has failed to deliver. And as a technologist who has been involved with three major projects that have used Java, I hate the complications that Java has caused.

I will concede that it is possible to use Java to create small applications that are downloaded over the Web and run within Web browsers. Over the past month, I've actually run into two such Java-based applications that worked pretty well. The first was a Java-based mortgage calculator that dramatically shows the financial advantage to pre-paying your home mortgage -- paying just $50 extra on a $733 monthly mortgage payment can save you $40,196 over the course of an 8 percent, 30-year loan. I was also particularly impressed by the Yahoo Finance Java-based portfolio manager, which lets you rapidly compare a large set of stocks using dozens of different variables.

Mano a mano with John McCain

Fri, 06 Oct 2000 16:23:00 +0000

Sen. John McCain stared down at me, broadcasting his typical uncompromising glare. "Is it a violation of privacy for lists of campaign contributors to be sold?" he asked.

Now let's see, I thought. Distributing lists of campaign contributors is good, right? But distributing lists of people's names, especially for a profit, is bad. What should I say?

"Well, as a democratic society, we've made a decision that it is worth the cost to privacy for campaign financing information to be made publicly available," I finally said. I'm not sure if that's an exact quote or not -- I was pretty shaken up. I couldn't figure out the answer.

McCain, R-Ariz., was clearly peeved. He said, more or less, that he didn't need me to explain to him the purpose of the campaign finance disclosure laws. No, he wanted me to answer the question: Does selling the list of campaign contributors violate privacy?

Mining data on mutilations, beatings, murders

Fri, 08 Sep 2000 18:48:00 +0000

"This would be a good time to leave."

That's what Patrick Ball heard in 1992 when he was working for the Salvadoran Human Rights Commission. Ball, a peace activist with expertise in data mining, had spent two years in El Salvador building a large-scale database that tracked atrocities and human rights violations perpetrated by both the Salvadoran government and militias during the 1970s and 1980s. It was a digital record of this most troubled period in that country's history.

The Human Rights Commission had actually created two databases. The first was a detailed account of threats, thefts, beatings, mutilations, murders and massacres. This database was largely created from eyewitness testimony -- more than 9,000 reports in all. The second was a database that tracked the careers of El Salvador's police and military, built largely from official records, newspaper accounts and some personal recollections.

Beware of geeks bearing gifts

Fri, 04 Aug 2000 19:00:00 +0000

Microsoft's decision to slash the price of the Windows Millennium Edition upgrade from $89 to $59 --- a whopping 33 percent savings -- made headlines this week. But the public should beware of geeks bearing gifts. Windows Me has some significant improvements, but for most users those improvements do not justify the pain and potential dangers they will face with this upgrade. Microsoft can lower the price of Windows Me and give it a few great features, but it can't fundamentally make Me a better operating system than Windows 95, because of underlying technical flaws with the whole Windows operating environment.

I know, because I spent more than a week struggling with a Windows Me upgrade before I gave up, reformatted my hard drive, installed a clean version of the operating system on my 550 MHz Pentium III desktop computer and reinstalled all of my applications. Now that my computer is finally operational once again, I'm quite pleased with the results. But I doubt that other computer users will think that the new features are worth the hassle.

Can a labeling system protect your privacy?

Tue, 11 Jul 2000 19:30:00 +0000

P3P, the new Internet privacy protocol unveiled last month by the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C), has been both lauded as the answer to everyone's privacy worries and castigated as a Trojan horse that will divert public attention from real problems. The truth is, it's neither. It's merely a potentially nifty tool that might help ensure privacy in cyberspace -- if the government gets its act together.

Among the boosters of Platform for Privacy Preferences Project, or P3P, we find the White House, major technology companies like Microsoft and America Online and organizations like the Center for Democracy and Technology. They position P3P as powerful technology that will help consumers to control the spread of their personal information over the Internet.

Microsoft, for instance, announced that support for P3P will be built into the next version of Internet Explorer, now the most popular Web browser on the planet. "Our commitment to protecting consumer privacy through technologies based on P3P and other efforts stems from Microsoft's long-standing focus on building technology that empowers the individual," said Microsoft's president and CEO Steve Ballmer.

Software that can spy on you

Thu, 15 Jun 2000 19:14:00 +0000

I was reading my e-mail somewhere over the Atlantic when my laptop tried to go online. I was in the middle of composing a rather lengthy e-mail, so I didn't think about it much. I just put Windows back into "work offline" mode and kept typing. But a moment later, I discovered that the laptop was back in online mode. Indeed, I soon discovered that no matter what I did, I couldn't keep the laptop in offline mode; it was determined to stay online.

Since I was running Windows, I did the normal thing you do when you encounter problems: I rebooted. But exactly the same thing happened when Windows came back up a few minutes later. So I started hunting around the laptop's operating system to see what was going on, and I discovered that a program called "DSSAgent" was silently running in the background. I killed the program with the Windows task manager and my computer started working normally.

Undo me!

Thu, 01 Jun 2000 19:03:00 +0000

If we want computers to be easier to use -- and who doesn't? -- a good place to start would be with that all-important command, "Undo." Although many of today's computer systems have some sort of undo capability, few of them work consistently throughout the system, or even in one application. As a result, users can't depend upon it, and lots of people lose a lot of work.

The need for a better undo is one of the important ideas in designer Jef Raskin's first book, "The Humane Interface," published earlier this year by Addison-Wesley. Although Raskin is perhaps best known as the creator of the Apple Macintosh project, his book is not a rant arguing why the Mac has a better user interface than Windows. Of course the Mac is better, says Raskin, but both computer systems have fundamental problems that make using them an unpleasant experience for both novices and experts alike.

Raskin bases his arguments not on opinion but on nearly 30 years of research by people around the world who have studied how the human brain interoperates with engineered systems from aircraft to computers. Raskin suggests that we should apply this research to the design, or redesign, of today's operating systems.

Bad company

Fri, 21 Apr 2000 16:00:00 +0000

Last week I received an e-mail message from Caldera Systems. "Finally, there's a Linux operating system that's as obsessed about the Internet as you are," it read. "Caldera Systems' OpenLinux eDesktop 2.4 is chock full of goodies to make your connection to the World Wide Web a craving like none other."

If I were obsessed with anything, it wasn't whatever new version of its operating system that Caldera happened to be pushing. I was far more interested in finding out how the company had gotten my e-mail address and why it was messaging me when I had never agreed to receive product promotions.

I called up Caldera spokeswoman Nancy Pomeroy. After much head-scratching, we decided that Caldera must have taken my e-mail address from an OpenLinux 2.3 registration card that I had filled out back in February, and added it to the company's mailing list. When I told her that I was offended, Pomeroy was confused: Surely, she said, I must have realized that Caldera would use my e-mail address to send me notices about new products. Why else would they ask for it?

How to avoid the evil eye

Fri, 21 Apr 2000 16:00:00 +0000

I doubt anyone would sign up for dozens
of daily e-mail messages promoting
strange herbal remedies and CD-ROMs that
contain 55 million e-mail addresses. But
when it comes to avoiding spam, your
options are, unfortunately, limited.
Many of the most effective techniques
for protecting your mailbox from spam
have the side effect of limiting the
ways that you can use the Internet.

There are two fundamental ways to keep
spam out of your in box. The first is to
prevent spammers from getting your
e-mail address in the first place. The
second is to filter out the incoming
spam from the e-mail that you actually
want to see.

Go stealth

If you are going to try to keep your
e-mail address from the spammers, you'll
need to apply constant vigilance.
Spammers have written programs that
harvest e-mail addresses from
practically every location you can
imagine: Web pages, Internet provider
directories, chat rooms and mailing list
archives. These robots are silent and
extremely effective: A friend of mine
who is a school teacher in Los Angeles
visited the "Parent Soup" chat room on
America Online; two days later, her
mailbox was filled with messages pushing
pornographic Web sites.

“Excuse me, are you human?”

Tue, 25 Jan 2000 17:00:00 +0000

"The number you have reached is not in service at this time. Please check the number you are dialing or contact your operator for assistance. This is a recording."

Remember that message? The time was the 1970s, and Bell Telephone was in the process of upgrading phone switching systems all over the country. Ma Bell, it seems, was fearful that a technologically unsophisticated customer might mistake Bell's recorded messages for an unresponsive, unfriendly, human being. Rather than risk an upset customer, the Bell system prefaced every message with a few tones, and concluded each with those oft-parodied words, "this is a recording."

Perhaps Ma Bell was being too cautious. Today those four magic words have largely been banished from the telecom lexicon, yet there's little fear among telco executives that somebody's grandma will start e-mailing complaints about rude and insensitive operators.

Ironically, if Grandma did write an e-mail about poor service, it's increasingly likely that her message might be read and replied to by a machine -- a machine engaged in the elaborate deception of pretending to be a human being.

Cable modem or DSL: Which is better?

Thu, 23 Sep 1999 16:00:00 +0000

A high-speed battle for digital dominance is unfolding across the United States. In one corner are the nation's cable companies -- AT&T and RCN, to name a couple -- which have been busily upgrading their networks and deploying cable modems for high-speed Internet access. In the other corner are local telephone companies, like the Baby Bells, and dozens of Internet service providers, which are deploying their own high-speed systems using a technology called digital subscriber line or DSL.

This competition between cable and telephone giants is just what Congress had in mind when it passed the Telecommunications Act of 1996. But while competition has pushed companies to bring out new services and lower prices, it also has created consumer confusion. It doesn't make sense to get both a cable modem and a DSL connection. So if both are available in your area, which should you get? Which is better?

Lately I've been caught somewhere in the middle of this great battle. As a technology columnist for the Boston Globe, I've been routinely peppered by questions from readers. They want to know which is faster today -- cable or DSL -- and which system will be faster in a few years, once everybody else in their neighborhood is online. They're also nervous about the security implications of having their computer constantly connected to the Internet and the supposed "party line" nature of cable modems.