Two Slashes

I could be lame and start off yet another post with gripes about how I don’t update this blog enough myself.  (Oh, wait, I just did.)  Suffice it to say that I’ve been busy with school, a bit of work, and some TV shows I’ve become interested in (which is a bit of a surprise, actually).  I recently discovered Fox’s new(ish) series Lie to Me, and I’ve been busy catching up on the previous season over the course of the past few days.

Alright, so maybe my post isn’t really about what I’ve watched recently, but more so how I’ve gone about it.  Actually, I probably don’t even need to mention that, but let’s just say that Hulu hasn’t been all that helpful.  And, if the news that’s just started spreading is true, it probably won’t be helpful to me for much longer, even to catch up on shows I already watch.

According to a few different news outlets, Hulu announced today that they would be transforming into a paid service sometime after the new year in an attempt to build the “Great Paywall of Television.”  While the timing bit is great news for those of us who want to make sure we see the Christmas specials of our favorite shows, it most certainly isn’t a good way to ring in the new year.  And the choice, given broadcast television’s traditional format of ad-supported free-to-watch broadcasts, is quite interesting.  Hulu claims that they’ll be leaving some content available for people who don’t want to break out their wallets, but I find it hard to believe that the new paid system will pull viewers in with the same level of effectiveness.  (But hey, what do I know?  I’m the guy who said Google Wave sucked only to end up with a few well-formulated comments about why it doesn’t.)

I’m a little confused, really, as it’s exactly this sort of behavior that causes people to download their music, movies, television shows, and software from questionable places.

If Hulu is going to go down this route, though, they’ll need to satisfy this list of demands (add any additional suggestions in the comments):

• For any show Hulu carries, the entire catalog must be available at all times.  If I’m able and willing to pay for the service, I had better be able to watch whatever I please.  If I want to make some popcorn and watch “Three Stories,” I’d better not have to wait until Fox decides to let Hulu run through the first season again.Consider it another way:  for the price of a few months, I can get a portable hard drive.  On this portable hard drive, I can store all the TV shows and movies I want and watch them anywhere I happen to have access to a computer.  (Given that my laptops have been following me around almost constantly as of late, this isn’t even a problem anymore.)  And I won’t have to wait for the show to buffer or sit through ads to watch it, either.
• Again, because I’m paying the bandwidth bills in the first place, I’d better be able to use the video in more than just my browser or the resource hog Hulu calls a desktop client.  I’d like to be able to put a few episodes of 24 on my ZEN, if you don’t mind.Nobody said that the downloaded episodes had to come without strings attached (watermark them, for all I care), but, as I pointed out already, any fool can grab a video from the newsgroups and load it onto their iPod.
• I really don’t care if it’s against my cell phone carrier’s data policy or not, but it’s not up to Hulu to decide that my phone (and anything attached to it) are not suitable mediums for watching shows.  If AT&T, Verizon, T-Mobile, or any other carrier has a problem with it, they can deal with it in their own method.  It’s not up to you to decide, and my first reaction to you trying to tell me what I can and cannot do with what I pay for is to tell you to sod off while I go somewhere else.

The way I see it, Hulu’s turning into a cute little portable polygraph detector, and all the other ways I can watch TV are like the egg.  They both have their downsides, but one appears to be “technologically superior” (bear with my metaphor) without really getting anything new or exciting done at the same time.  They might want to re-think their position before they end up found guilty of screwing up their business plans to the point where they can’t be recovered.

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It doesn’t take a meteorologist to predict the tsunami that a preview of Google’s new Wave platform would cause.  I can’t click one link without seeing three different remarks referencing the hot new app, though I can’t seem to understand why people are so excited about it.

In case you’ve got a bad memory or hearing loss, I’ll quickly give an overview of Wave to save the sanity of my remaining readers before delving into just what about the platform I don’t like.  For the uninitiated, Wave is a platform Google announced this summer that combines document editing, an e-mail-like environment, live collaborative capabilities, and enhancements provided by “robots” (as opposed to the generally used “bot”) into a single unified experience.  Everything is done in real-time, so modifications you’re in the middle of can be observed by anyone else in that particular thread (referred to as a wave).  It’s an open platform, so anybody can write a “robot” or extend the API, but so far I haven’t seen anything remotely productive beyond a Twitter bot or various games.  (Maybe I’m just ignorant.)

Along with Google’s original announcement, they offered developers early access as they tweaked a few things so that when preview time came about (now, in other words), there would be plenty of examples and enough bragging rights to go around.  It was also a great way to acquaint people with an enhanced interest in the product (like myself), and I was one of the lucky people selected to get in on the sandbox.

I never developed anything for Wave, let alone used it for anything productive, but I did spend a few minutes chatting with a few friends who also found themselves with sandbox access and a little too much boredom in their lives.  I also watched as several people immediately decided to turn their sights towards robots geared to spam ads and utter nonsense (including one bugger that kept embedding YouTube videos of Rick Astley’s hit song…yeah, that one).  All the same, with just a handful of friends and a low signal-to-noise ratio, I really didn’t see a point in regularly checking the site.

When Google finally announced their semi-public preview (read:  everybody sends invitations everywhere), I was unsure of whether I even wanted to bother with it.  It’s not to say that I don’t like Google (I have several domains running Google Apps, a few Gmail accounts, a Google Voice account or three, and some extra paid storage to boot), but the nasty taste from the developer’s preview combined with the fact that I didn’t think too many friends would bother with it left me undecided but leaning towards not bothering to move my account into the preview.

It goes without saying that I got bored and ported the account anyway, and I’ve asked myself why I bothered ever since.

The way I see it, Wave is something of a novelty at this point in time and in its current state.  It’s not useful to anybody (at least, anybody I know), and it doesn’t do anything I find worthwhile that I can’t already implement or find support for, either in another Google app (think Docs and Gmail in particular) or elsewhere.  And the fact that it isn’t integrated with Gmail is a disappointment, as I feel that they could have turned Gmail into a legitimate killer app by adding Wave as a Gmail Labs option (which keeps the opt-in approach for people who decide they want to “catch the Wave”).

In fact, I’m wondering why Google didn’t opt for the b@$*@&d-child approach in the first place, because as-is Gmail just isn’t the innovative utility it was when it first launched.  Yahoo! offers more space (namely, as much as you want for free), and there’s really nothing of note at this point that the Google/Gmail experience offers that can’t be found elsewhere.  Being a plugin for a service that a good number of people use, though, offers a much wider userbase and might pull in some people who otherwise might not even be aware of Wave’s existence.  Google’s always touted Gmail as the “revolutionary” e-mail platform, but there’s nothing revolutionary about being second fiddle overall.  (A free Exchange server?  Seriously, this is the best they can offer?)

And, rather than forcing the user to keep two tabs or windows open so they can monitor both their incoming messages and Wave updates, the integration would be a step in the right direction.  (I really think they should look into developing Google Insight, the Google-powered, web-based alternative to Outlook with one-click access to everything.  Outlook…Insight…get it?  Bah!)

And I know I’m not the only person thinking that Wave is really over-hyped.  I’ve talked with several friends who were excited to get their invites, only to have their hopes and dreams wipe out, and the people who start threads with me seem to abandon them after just a few minutes.

Like the beach, Wave is just one more thing I don’t see myself visiting regularly.  It’s not to say that I won’t try to check it (on occasion), but there’s really no compelling reason for me to do so.  If I really had a need for a collaborative environment where the features Google provides are exactly what I’m looking for, maybe I’d feel differently.  But, as of now, I can’t see this taking off until someone finds a better use for it.  I’d sooner pay for an Evernote subscription than have to deal with any more water metaphors.

This really sums it up.

As a very select few of you might know, I’m a (very) casual user of Qik.  For the uninitiated, Qik is a popular (especially now, thanks to the iPhone 3GS) video streaming application similar to Ustream or Justin.tv, the difference being that Qik requires a cell phone instead of a webcam and a computer.

My experience with Qik has been hit-or-miss, but generally it’s been a positive one, which is why I continued to use the service in the first place.  However, the events of the past hour or so have made me reconsider that position, especially now that I have a netbook I could use instead with my Justin.tv account.  Let me additionally point out the fact that the previous version of the Qik client I had on my phone worked perfectly.  It was familiar, it functioned as advertised, and I didn’t have any complaints with the way it worked on my phone.

Anyway, I generally consider it a polite gesture when a service decides to let me know that there’s something on my end I need to do to continue my use of the service.  I think that makes things feel a little more personal when you let the customer know that the latest and greatest is out and that there’s a tangible benefit to upgrading.  Qik, on the other hand, sent me this rather sparse e-mail this evening with the air of making it sound like something was broken.  Alright, stuff breaks, and I can understand that, but the unclear meaning of this e-mail was my first clue that I shouldn’t have bothered.

Given that it’s Labor Day, I’m taking a break from some of my schoolwork for the moment, and updating Qik shouldn’t take more than a few seconds, I decided to oblige the e-mail’s request and update.  That was my mistake.  Oops.

In contrast to my previous experiences with Qik, this “update” seems more like a leap backward than it does a step forward.  If you’ll take a look at the picture I’ve included, there are two things I would like you to notice.  First, if you’ll examine the screen on my phone for a moment, you’ll notice that my Treo Pro appears to be capturing the episode of House I was watching as well as it possibly can…but that it’s doing so with the user interface rotated clockwise.  Unfortunately, something between the client and the website isn’t properly functioning, because, while I should be seeing Hugh Laurie’s face on my 22” LCD, instead I’m seeing severe artifacting and the vague suggestion that it might be the fifth season of Fox’s hit show I’m watching.  I’ve tested this multiple times (on both a cellular 3G connection and Wi-Fi), and I get the same results all the way around each time.  And, while I’m not going to point fingers, I think I know where the problem is because there are plenty of people still broadcasting as you read this.

There’s a huge difference between releasing a test version of your software with the expectation that these bugs are present and that they will be reported and sending e-mails trumpeting end-user updates to your legion of users, updates that should be devoid of functionality quirks like this.  What am I supposed to do with Qik now that I can’t actually use it for the one function it’s designed to perform?  I’m currently slogging back trying to find the CAB for the previous version of the client, the one that actually works, in hopes of moving forward and fixing this mess, but I’m not entirely concerned given that it’s not something I use on a daily basis anyway.

All the same, let this be a lesson to the rest of you, one that you can probably apply regardless of the industry you’re in and regardless of whether you’re technically inclined or not.  If you’re going to ask that your users (or customers, or whatever term you use for the people you deal with in your line of work) should take action in some form or another, make sure that they don’t get screwed for obliging you.  Do your homework, run your test cases, follow through on your research and quality assurance; in other words, make sure that you’re not asking people to make the jump from a Ferrari to a station wagon.

Edit (9/9/2009): Apparently Qik is now aware of the issue and suggests that users experiencing issues like this backpedal to an alternate version of the software that wasn’t designed for the phone.  Great job, guys!

Alright, so the title of this post is a complete and utter lie.  Read even half of the post and it might make sense.

Rather than bore you to death with the usual tirade about the poor quality of a video game or rant about the status of things on the Internet, I wanted to take a few seconds to point out some of the obvious flaws in our health education system, as revealed by HealthBase.  HealthBase, according to TechCrunch, is a medical content aggregator (I call their approach a search engine, mind you) designed to help you drill through the muck and straight to an answer.  Think WebMD, but with answers supplied by the Internet at large.

I decided that, given the nature of some of the answers I received to my queries, as well as the popularity that this particular Yahoo! Answers post (about how babies are formed, you bum) reached with some of my friends at school last year, I should answer that time-old question first.  And, as I might have hinted at with the title, HealthBase thoughtfully suggested that children are caused by secondhand smoke.  Discussing this answer with a friend, we came up with the explanation that this makes sense when you consider a drunk college girl at a smoky bar leaving with a guy she doesn’t know.  Given an image like that, I’m not surprised at all at the confusion.  I’m glad that HealthBase was able to answer that question for me.

Moving along, I decided that it was also imperative that I brush up on my profession-related injuries, so I decided to look up treatments for carpal-tunnel syndrome.  If you ignore the fact that the suggestion is based upon another name for CTS, blackberries are a suggested treatment.  If I do end up suffering from carpal-tunnel at some point in the future, I’ll make sure to stock the fridge up with as many as I can.

HealthBase also does an excellent job of educating you on the cons of insanity, which include brain dysfunction, the killing of blood relatives, and the ever-detailed “so horrific.”  I can’t wait for people who kill their families to start using this information for insanity pleas at their trials.  On the positive side, however, being classified as insane means that you have achieved your goals, which makes me wonder just how bad insanity really is.

Additionally, being a fan of House, I was curious about how HealthBase would hold up as an aid while watching episodes of the show.  Hulu (which is running through the fifth season as of this posting) sounded like a good place to pick a test episode from, and so I ended up watching “The Social Contract” (Hulu link, episode recap) through.  Borrowing from diagnoses made throughout the show, we learn that a “valid” treatment for peripheral nerve damage is manipulation (Wait, is that a House reference itself? ) and that Weil’s disease can be caused by philosophy through appropriate searches performed using the service.  So there is a reason for House’s character development to have taken the path it has, after all…

While this website may just be the ticket to confirming that snorting vinegar cures hiccups when you’re trying to impress friends, I think I’ll leave my medical opinions to a licensed professional, and I suggest that you do the same.  Frankly, I’m a little terrified that one day it might suggest that the best treatment for dandruff is something more terrifying than responsibility, like amputation or open-heart surgery, and seeing as we can’t trust people with simple things like GPS, it’s only a matter of time before we get to hear stories revolving around the use of this site unless its quality is improved.  On the other hand, though, I didn’t know that stupidity went hand-in-hand with the contents of your wallet.

In retrospect, perhaps I shouldn’t have mentioned that insanity query.  I’m undoubtedly going to have even more fun watching my incoming search terms now.

Caution:  This post includes gratuitous amounts of speculation about web services and the Internet in general.  If you prefer to deal in the world of concretes, I suggest you read yesterday’s newspaper instead.  Or send me a cement mixer.

Almost a year ago, we had Cuil.  Claiming to be an instant success over Google, and even grabbing up some of the behemoth’s staff, Cuil ultimately did exactly what most people expected to happen:  it flopped.  Earlier this year, Wolfram released Alpha and came to the realization that, while people are looking for the facts, their approach isn’t one that applies universally.  And at the beginning of June, Microsoft decided that they wanted to “Bing it on” and found that renaming your search engine might earn them a place above Yahoo!, but it doesn’t really get anywhere near the top, especially when marketed as a “decision engine.”  And now, I think someone’s going to try again.

To be honest, none of the major tech outlets have anything to say about them (yet), and the only reason I know of their plan is through their increasingly-common spidering of this blog.  Bear with me a moment, because I’m sure you’re just as confused as I was.

A quick glance at Apnoti’s home page doesn’t tell you much about their intentions.  In fact, all you really find out is that they seem to have been playing a variation of the product search game for more than a year, and they’ve differentiated themselves by offering the ability to watch prices on Amazon for the things you want.  To the best of my knowledge and examination, there’s no explanation for or mention of any other projects they’re working on available for consumption.

Beneath the shopping lies hopes and dreams of being something more, though.  The page hosted on the subdomain that keeps showing up in my statistics (smart.apnoti.com) is simple enough, bearing only a countdown to August and the suggestion that real-time search is coming.  But what’s left to search in real time?  My guess:  blogs and other sites refreshed with new content at semi-regular rates.  Think about it.  Google Blog Search might exist, but it’s far from showing you what’s happening in real time (unless you enjoy hitting refresh repeatedly, that is), and scraping Twitter only gets you so far, especially when there are already so many variants.

If what I envision is true, imagine being able to type in a recent event, like Michael Jackson’s death, and watch as the blogosphere fills up with reports and commentaries about the event.  Not trivial-length blurbs and “I can’t believe this happened!”-type posts, but posts of a reasonable length and with some backing to them.  It’s a niche that I have yet to see filled, and I think it has the potential to be a great service, provided the sites they index maintain some level of credibility.  (If you need a description, imagine something along the lines of Twitter Search, Facebook’s timeline, or Profilactic as your search results page, sorted with the newest posts first, and the ability to click a link and have any new results that have shown up populate into your present view.

Whether there’s a market for this sort of thing is another question altogether.  There’s no doubt that everyone and everything is moving toward real-time information sharing, so it makes sense to me that this is a logical step along that route.  On the other hand, such a move is a costly risk; one false move, one mistake, and all that hard work becomes a black hole for money.  There’s also the massive resource requirement to consider, as it’s no easy task to index the countless blogs available online and come away with even a decent index of all the content they offer.  Add to that the load required to keep their results fresh and relevant, and the requirement shoots up even further.

Of course, I’ve proven that I have a mediocre track record when it comes to predictions, so I might just be further cementing myself as a crackpot when Apnoti decides to open up the site as some sort of gadget guide.  However, even if I’m far off, I would still like to see this idea.  One day.

Every time I get to read about the RIAA (or, as the case may be here, ASCAP) and their crazy schemes for raising royalty money, I grow a little more confident in thinking that these organizations are doing nothing but trying to alienate their members with each passing day.  And, so far, this thinking hasn’t let me down.  I’m especially loving the idea to charge for incoming calls proposed by ASCAP as reported by TechDirt a little while ago.

I’m not trying to defend the phone companies (they’ve got enough wrong with them to warrant a small novel), but let’s stop here for a second and think.  It’s downright impossible for the phone company to keep track of what ringtone your phone emits, let alone that there’s no reason for them to want to collect that data or care that one person is alerted to calls by Garth Brooks while another listens to Pink Martini or a third plays back the bridge from a Creative Commons-licensed song they found on Jamendo.  Obviously, we have licensing issues to take into account, because there’s certainly no way AT&T is liable for a song in the public domain.

Then there’s also the difficulty of determining whether whatever song they’ve identified is even being played publicly.  For example, I have an ‘instrumental’ chop of The Limousines’ “New Year’s Resolution” currently set as the ringtone on my Treo.  Let’s say, for the sake of argument, that AT&T knows this (perhaps because their friends at the NSA have nothing better to do and tipped them off).  Now, how do they determine which of the following scenarios is currently in effect?

1. My phone is in ring mode.  The phone will proudly play The Limos to anyone and everyone standing near me every time my mother calls.
2. My phone is in vibrate mode.  The phone will play absolutely nothing, even though it wants to play something, but instead will silently bounce around if placed on a table while being called by Don.
3. I have a pair of headphones plugged in.  Regardless of the ring/vibrate setting, my phone will pipe “New Year’s Resolution” into my ears while the phone waits for me to pick up a call from Google Voice.

By my understanding and thought, only that first scenario would be even remotely a public performance and only in such a case would AT&T have to pay for the playback of my (awesome) ringtone.  And, admittedly, it’s hard to call any ringtone a public performance when (usually) the clip being played is less than thirty seconds in length because the call is picked up or sent to voicemail.  Get a bunch of people in a large crowd, each with a different 30-second chunk of a song, and call them in the correct order, and maybe you’re onto some artsy project that needs licensing, but, for the typical cell phone user, I think that’s just dumb.  And let’s not even get into how many people need to be within x feet of the phone in order for it to be considered a public performance or anything like that.

Naturally, if your carrier had to pay for your pleasure, they’re going to want their profit margins exactly as they were (if not a little more padded), and the call is obviously your fault, so there’s nothing like passing on the cost to their customers (just like they do for incoming SMS messages, for example).

If this gets even a little support outside of the usual groups, I can’t see things going well for consumers.  And if you we do start paying for our ringtones…by all means, make full use of your library.

Chances are, if you’ve logged into Facebook anytime in the past two days or so, you were probably greeted by the following notification above your news feed informing you of Facebook’s switch to usernames.  (Of course, it was also probably readable , but I like trying not to overrun the sidebar.)  For a service that has long required you to refer to yourself by number, almost as if you were helpfully and willfully subjecting yourself to a prison sentence (and there are reasons for me selecting this metaphor in particular, but they’re outside the scope of this post), the ability to individually identify yourself on your own terms is quite a jump.

Despite this huge change for Facebook, though, I think I’ve still seen more posts about Twitter (alright, I get it, it’s the hot new thing thanks to Oprah, but there’s only so many times I can read about a new startup *cough*Spymaster*cough* without looking for the nearest stabbing implement to use on myself) show up in Google Reader or on Digg or Reddit.  So, what’s the big deal?

I suppose you could think of this in terms of license plates.  You could go with whatever random assortment of letters and numbers your state assigns you when you register your car, and play along regardless of if you get W376JSB or 3826273, or you could jump through whatever hoops are required and get a plate that has your name, IRC nickname, or favorite type of cheese on it.  This is Facebook’s equivalent to giving you vanity plates for that Camaro of yours.  You know, unless prison numbers are your thing.

Of course, all cool news has to come with some strings attached, and Facebook is of course not one of those extremely rare exceptions.  However, according to the Facebook Blog, they’re rather tame things like that you can only use the “Romanized alphabet” (I think someone meant to say “Latin” here, and it’s not me), numbers, and periods.  (There’s the obvious technical issue of using things like question marks, hash marks, and ampersands in a URL here to blame.)  That shouldn’t be a big deal, though.  It’s not like you can put an interrobang on your license plate, though Facebook also warns that they’re looking into extended character support.  Of course, once you claim a name, you can’t change it (which is not the case over at Twitter, though MySpace still wrote your name in permanent marker the last time I was there), so there’s no gaming the system to reserve “CutiePie” for your girlfriend…you know, unless YOU want to be referred to as “CutiePie” (and who wouldn’t?).

Once you reserve that name, you get the awesome perk of being able to use facebook.com/yourusernamehere to refer new friends directly to your profile instead of making them search for you, dig through all the people with similar names to find the one with the right network and picture (if you have a reasonably useful picture, that is), and worry for three days about whether they attempted to befriend the right person or not.

Being the technical weenie I am, the rules Facebook imposed also gave me a slew of ideas of how Facebook could improve this system.  I put my head together with Nick Schwab, and we came up with the following in less than a minute:

• Since those “Romanized” characters are more or less the only legal characters in a domain name (excepting the hyphen), it would be easy for Facebook to give users a subdomain rather than append their name to the end.  In an ideal circumstance, both methods would work the same way, but it might provide for more “ownership” of that username and profile if a subdomain were used instead.  (If you’re not following me, think yourusername.facebook.com as opposed to that example above.)
• Facebook could use these unique URLs (either the method I’ve suggested using subdomains or Facebook’s original implementation) to support OpenID, an identification technology that you might have heard of considering its extensive use here on this blog.  Considering Facebook seems to want a piece of the identity market (Facebook Connect, anyone?), allowing users to use this would be a feature I suggest they implement.
• Again, excepting hypens, the character range covers everything usable in an e-mail address.
  • Perhaps Facebook will allow users to send e-mail to username@facebook.com, which would be a great way to get in touch with people without them having to make their e-mail address public.  Admittedly, this kind of detracts from the use of Facebook’s built-in messaging.
  • If Facebook went after the subdomain system I outlined above, they would be in a great position to provide an e-mail-based interface to the site, something that would make Facebook accessible from an even wider range of devices and platforms.  Perhaps sending a note to wall@username.facebook.com would allow you to post on someone’s wall remotely, while message@ would provide the same functionality as sending a private message.  Want to post some photos?  Attach them to a note and fire it off to photos@, where they’ll immediately be added to an album titled by your subject line.

Some people aren’t as happy about the change, though.  I vaguely recall one person (I don’t recollect where I saw it or who said it, so if it was you, speak up in the comments) comparing Facebook to MySpace in this respect, saying that the former is moving towards the latter in terms of usability and obnoxious features, and another person suggesting that this is just the next step in Facebook’s transition to “become” Twitter.

Of course, I could be the world’s biggest idiot for getting excited over this (to the point where it’s managed to be added to my Google Calendar), but I’ll gladly be one of the first people to claim their name.  So, what do you think?  Are you going to be eagerly waiting for a chance to prove how much of a “Cool.Kid.123″ you are, or would you like those prisoner numbers tattooed onto your neck?

If you’re reading this, the topic of Windows 7 has probably already been worn so thin it’s liable to be used as the cling-wrap protecting your next party dish.  If it has, I apologize in advance.  If it hasn’t…well, I’ll put up money towards the first person who isn’t tired of a Microsoft-branded discussion by the end of this.  Oh, and the Geeky categorization?  It’s been earned at least three times over in this post, so avoid at all costs if you don’t want to be wearing a confused look for the next month.

The release candidate for the next version of the must-have-if-you-work-in-an-office-setting operating system has been put out and the critiques are already coming in.  (In short, they can be summed up as saying that Windows 7 is the better-looking younger brother to Windows Vista, though they’re both of about equal intelligence, but that’s beside the point.)

The group of people I’ve been most concerned with hearing from regarding the operating system upgrade is security researchers.  Given that this is a field I take  a reasonable amount of interest in, I’m actually rather alarmed that the only topic I seem to be watching pop up is the same “issue” that’s plagued Windows for over a decade.  And yes, those quotation marks are intentional and completely reasonable.

Once upon a time, there was DOS and Windows 3.1.  You were limited to 11-character filenames in the “8-dot-3″ format, where the first 8 characters were a user-specified name for the file and the last three were an extension denoting the type of file it was.  Then came Windows 95, and lo and behold the world was amazed that you could have these amazing 255-character filenames (which were really just an overlay to the old 8-dot-3 system) and give your files reasonably descriptive names!  And you could use punctuation (granted that the punctuation you wanted wasn’t a question mark, backslash, forward slash, pipe, or any of another two or three characters) too, which made things even better!  Sure, the file extensions were still there (and are to this day, as is the legacy 8-dot-3 filename), but nobody complained for they could name their files “My Letter To My Boss About Me Quitting Next Week.doc” and all was right with the world.

Of course, nobody complained until this file extension voodoo was abused.  You see, Windows defaults to a setting where you don’t have to see those ugly file extensions because they take up screen space and confuse newbies.  And, in my book, it’s a reasonable expectation that most people don’t want to see them.  (For the record, I turn this functionality off, but that’s a whole different topic.)

With the advent of the Internet, people (even the newbies) have been blindly trained to start recognizing certain file extensions for what they are anyway, even if they aren’t technically inclined to do so.  For example, even if you aren’t a geek, I’m sure you know what a .jpg, .gif, .doc, or .zip at the end of a filename denotes.  It’s useful knowledge, even for someone who prefers things that Just Work™.

Expanding this same notion to the contents of a user’s local files, that user is just as unafraid and accepting of seeing .jpg as they are online to the point where they don’t even think twice.  After all, what’s the worst thing that could come out of an image?  Porn?  An old photograph of Aunt Millie?

If you answered in the affirmative to either of those two suggestions, most people would urge you to jump off of the nearest highway overpass, though I’ll accept either of those as correct answers.  This giant group of security researchers, some of whom work for the same companies that ultimately provide the software your favorite pimply-faced Geek Squad employee will be installing on your next PC, have nothing better to do with their time than to complain about a well-intentioned feature.

I cannot count (on one hand, at least) the number of articles I have seen recently (like this one) that cry “Wolf!” over a trivial morsel like hiding file extensions only to have a piece of malware call itself “AuntMillie.jpg.exe.”  And here’s where my post title comes into play.  Is it Microsoft’s fault for adding what amounts to a (in my opinion) useful feature?  Is it the Symantec and McAfee developers (to name the recognizable duo, though just about any security suite provider should be included here) who kindly will alert you that you installed Cain (and then promptly remove it) but refuse to sound an alarm or do anything about legitimate malware (I’ve had this issue)?  Is it the end user for not disabling the feature and being vigilant and knowing what they’re doing?

I suppose we’ve become too dependent on file extensions for me to suggest that Microsoft ditch the idea, join the Unix crowd, and start using the contents of the file to figure out what it is rather than its name.  For example, web servers will use the file extension to determine what type of file you’re requesting and whether anything needs to be done (like executing it) before it gets passed along to the end user.  Granted, file extension hackery can be fun (who knew), but it would be a small price to pay (and the files would still be accessible by other applications, so it really doesn’t even ruin the fun).

However, it seems perfectly reasonable to me to demand why these same security gurus are not busy including a feature of their own to warn of questionably-named files.  I can think of few legitimate reasons for someone to have two or more extensions appended to their filename, so warning of files that end in “.txt.exe” on creation or execution probably isn’t a bad idea.

And to think that I've done more work in thirty seconds with the Visual Studio form designer than the security gurus have in over a decade. (For the technical: Yes, I realize that user conventions would switch the position of these buttons. However, you don't want anyone going to the "Yes" button out of habit, do you?)

If I wasn’t starting my final exams tomorrow, I’d probably write a proof-of-concept that accomplished this simply because I don’t know of anything similar that already exists.  (On the other hand, it is something for me to work on rather than study… )

For a group of security-focused people, their intentions are in approximately the right place.  However, they seem to be forgetting that there’s more to computing (and life) than three or four extra characters on a screen and the bright intentions of a few developers in Redmond.

(Cripes, and to think I would be writing over one thousand words in defense of Microsoft…  I really must be off my rocker.)

If it’s easy to pull the wool over your eyes, Wednesday was probably not your day.  If you’re Kathleen Danielson, for example, you avoided any links lest they end up Rickrolls.  I feel that April Fool’s Day is a pretty amusing (and dangerous) time to be an Internet…well, addict, I guess, and it’s a day I particularly enjoy.  (The danger is only compounded if you were spending your day in the fetal position worrying about Conficker, but I’ll get to that in a second.)

Compared to recent years, I think that this year’s bag of tricks was relatively tame.  DeviantArt (at least, as far as I know) wasn’t propogating 4chan memes (mudkips, anyone?) and the most YouTube did was flip videos upside-down.  Sure, ThinkGeek had bacon paste (but who doesn’t love bacon), and it sounds just believable enough that it might end up like their 8-bit tie from April Fools’ past.

I thought this picture only added credibility to my April Fool's joke, even though it was only by coincidence that Rose happened to tag me right after my status change. Apparently I was the only one to think so.

I myself decided to participate, though I didn’t really come up with my pranks until five minutes before midnight.  For starters, I was uncreative enough to be one of the dozens of people changing their relationship status on Facebook.  And, in a stroke of luck, a friend soon tagged me in a photo that made my status change almost believable.  Alas, I didn’t hear anything from my friends when I changed my status to claim that I was in a relationship, but a few friends started an uproar on the return trip.

The other trick started off on a new site of mine.  At the recommendation of Rachelskirts, I purchased the domain ShouldIUseComicSans.com to match a similar offering (thanks, @EricVictorino) only a few hours before, then decided that it changing what it said would be an excellent joke (but for one day only).  People fell for it, too.

I’m trying to come up with even better pranks for next year, though I’m coming up short.  I suppose it doesn’t really matter, as I have 363 more days to dwell on it.  (Suggestions are most welcome, though it might do better to e-mail them so there isn’t a public record to ruin the surprise.)

The corporate giants with the practical jokes weren’t the only people headlining on April 1, though.  Conficker, the latest worldwide scare, managed to slip through the day with very little fanfare.  Of course, there were isolated incidents, like my college campus blaming an outage on the worm, but on the whole I didn’t see too many news articles regarding the blasted thing.  Some people seem to think that this is exactly how it should be, though (and I agree).  However, you can’t deny that the Internet is still wholly intact.  (After all, you’re able to read this post, right?)

And, on a completely unrelated note, I decided to mess around with my dust-collecting Tumblr account.  There’s more information about that posted on the blasted thing, though, so I’ll let you visit if you’re interested in the matter.  (Hey, it could use the traffic anyway.)

Oh, and one more thing:  I’m in a relationship…alright, I don’t think you believed that for a second.  I don’t blame you, though.

Yesterday, I was messing around with Facebook and ended up stumbling into what I thought was a bit of a privacy leak.  I wrote it up, and it’s now available on the Writeups page or at this link.

I’m still doing some small edits to the article, but I wanted to make sure I got this notification post out before midnight so people would take it at least mildly seriously.  (Tomorrow’s April Fool’s Day, remember?)

Read it, pass it along, try it for yourself…ignore it.  It really doesn’t matter.  I just thought there might be a few people who wanted to know.

Feel free to leave feedback about it in the comments, including any suggestions you have on how to improve the content.