I am … unhindered by talent

I just had to take four on-line safety courses here at Essex in order to get money from our research grant. I’ll spare you the horrors, although I did twitter on about of some of them as I went as a sanity saving device, and will share a couple:

“Keeping your workstation and office tidy is crucial to short-term and long-term health and wellbeing.” I am doomed.

[The] Irony of spending much of an hour wading through a tedious online lesson on risks of spending too long at the computer is not lost on me.

As if the exams themselves weren’t annoying enough (and trust me, they were), the people that assembled them implicitly assumed that everyone in the world is in Microsoft’s pocket. I eventually became so frustrated that when I’d verified that I’d passed them all, I sent the following along to the folks that put all this together:

While I’m here, I should mention that there were several pieces of media that seemed to assume that one was on a Windows box. Quite a few images (clip art, I assume) didn’t load on either a Linux box or a Mac. Also the PowerPoint in the “Working at height” lesson assumed that you had PowerPoint or some compatible viewer, which isn’t always going to be true.

None of these problems were fatal for me. There didn’t appear to be important content in any of the images that I couldn’t view, and I was able to view the PowerPoint file in another program. Still they were confusing and frustrating (especially at first), and it would presumably be fairly easy (if somewhat tedious) to convert them all to a more standard and open format.

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The Economist has an interesting piece on why government web services tend to suck, especially when compared with the best corporate services. Their take is that a significant part of it is that isn’t any kind of competition, so there isn’t much fall out if government web tools are wretched:

When Britain’s Inland Revenue website crashed on January 31st—the busiest day of its year—the authorities grudgingly gave taxpayers one day’s grace before imposing penalties. They did not offer the chance to pay tax in Sweden instead.

I suspect there’s significant truth in this, but I’m not convinced it’s the whole story. It’s amazing, for example, how many university web sites/tools are pretty wretched, including those in the computer science departments. You’d think that would drive away prospective students in ways that, in this very competitive environment, would have the kind of direct consequences that purportedly drive Amazon and Google. I certainly know that the U of M’s growing adoption/creation of on-line tools has hardly been without its trials and travails; many of their web tools are really nice, while others totally make me want to cry. Sometimes the problems are lack of infrastructure supporting the development and maintenance of the tools (a problem that’s clearly plagued many business making the transition from bricks and morter to on-line). Sometimes the problem is infighting and bureaucratic silliness that would be cut off at the knees in a well managed company (but isn’t always - not all companies are well managed).

I think, however, that one of the chronic problems (for the U of M, for governments, and for many companies) stems from the fact that the key decision makers just don’t use the internet much, so they’re not well positioned to judge the success and failure of their organization’s efforts. They often don’t use their own tools, so they don’t know how painfully awful they are, and when they do use them they don’t have the rich frame of reference needed to see what could be instead of just what is. And thus we get embarrassingly precambrian web tools. Compare this to Google, for example, where it’s clear that (a) their people are using their tools at all levels and (b) they’re very aware of what other people are doing on the web (and not just in the area of search tools).

Tip of the cap to Naughton once again for the pointer.

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Apparently Facebook is collecting even more information about us than we thought:

A Computer Associates security researcher is sounding the alarm that Facebook’s controversial Beacon online ad system goes much further than anyone has imagined in tracking people’s Web activities outside the popular social networking site.

Beacon will report back to Facebook on members’ activities on third-party sites that participate in Beacon even if the users are logged off from Facebook and have declined having their activities broadcast to their Facebook friends.

I can’t say I’m surprised - the entire design of Facebook has consistently been geared to extract as much information as possible from their users, and they haven’t exactly been sneaky or subtle about it. Still, a depressing wake up call for all those folks who are blithely spilling their lives all over social networking systems.

They don’t provide much in the way of technical details. However, as the wonderful Web 2.0 world moves us farther and farther away from the web as a collection of simple text pages with HTML tags thrown in for pretties, there are more and more ways that we can be tracked and subverted. We can certainly do more (I do love Flickr, and Google Calendar is a joy), but we expose ourselves to increasingly more risk as a consequence.

Caveat emptor.

(Apparently Facebook has turned off Beacon, although my suspicion is that Beacon is just the tip of Facebook’s data collection iceberg.)

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