I find it interesting that AOL would attempt to play a humor card while they tout their own rusty horn, especially when you consider this is the same AOL that uses Google to power their search engine. Excuse me a second while I point out that this makes everyone at AOL look like a pack of three-year-olds without a babysitter and add myself to the numerous people who agree.

As someone who’s had rather interesting personal experiences with AOL over the past decade or so, I find their behavior here fairly lame.  Given those same experiences, though, I guess I can’t be too surprised.

I do have some words of advice for AOL, though (and I can think of a few others who can take something away from this as well, in a more generalized form, of course):

• When you’re trying to mock a company who may be trailing you in one area, it might be wise to consider whether you’re partners with them or not in another.  Nobody wants to do business when the only words you can say are, “I’m better than you,” especially when you seem to have forgotten that you’re not.
• Just because you’ve managed to beat someone to market with something as silly as an IM to SMS bridge doesn’t make you better.  I can’t exactly call most of Google’s offerings bloated, but I do suggest you go take a look at the whale you call your Internet portal and see how much fat you can trim out.  If it can’t function, I don’t care that it looks all glossy and shiny and can make little noises to notify me that somebody’s picking their nose.
• Perhaps there’s more to the Google branding than meets the eye, especially in professional terms.  Before you make a snide comment about Google only allowing users a Gmail domain, perhaps consider that nobody is going to use an address such as nicktabick@crazyforemail.com to conduct professional business.  (I find that address too stupid for personal use, either.  I also believe I’ve seen that address in my Spam folder before, but I digress…)
• If Halloween is a grand occasion to make fun of one of your partner/competitors, I wonder what Christmas is going to be like at the AOL offices this year.  However, for everyone’s sake, it might be better to ensure that the liquor, sugar, caffeine, and everything else that might get one of the press writers giddy is safely locked up lest someone posts a follow-up entry making fun of Time Warner.

Perhaps someone at AOL had a few too many candy bars before they came in for work (or, from the look of the timestamp on their post, on their lunch break).  Nice try, but next time around, use the sugar rush on something more productive – like decent software.

I paid $350 or so for my first useful* laptop (I say that with quotes for a reason, see below) during the summer between my freshman and sophomore years of high school, with my first MP3 player just a short while before that.  I’ve only had possession of a personal cellular telephone for a year.  I’ve had an account with AOL since the second grade (which, although I personally refuse to use the AOL client anymore, I still have).  And I’ve been really only establishing my online presence (with forums, websites, and the like) since the end of middle school.

Why do I tell you this, seemingly randomly?  I was perusing through the New York Times website today, and came across an article discussing the recommended ages children should be introduced to the very same technologies I just mentioned.  And obviously there’s some disagreement between what the article suggests and what I believe to be more appropriate, or I wouldn’t be bothered enough to write about it.

For ages 0-2, I can generally agree with the author.  I don’t see a reason your kid should be messing with anything electronic with more complication than making noise or blinking lights.  They’re way too young to understand cause-effect scenarios, and I certainly don’t foresee anybody’s newborn being able to “Press Enter to Continue…”

Sure, maybe all the fake toddler-toys are probably 1/4 as mind-stimulating as they’re advertised to be, but are they really ready to play online games?  No offense, but it seems to me like they want to train the next generation of WoW addicts from an early age; they’ll be more tolerant to the obsessive clicking and typing and random key-pressing it takes, and their vision will already be so screwed over from staring at the screen that they’ll have a 6000-strength glasses prescription by the time they’re eight.  Pardon me, but how about giving them their Playskool MP3 boombox thingy and sending them out to the sandbox?  And suggesting a Wii as a console for kids still trying to figure out why the cat doesn’t go in the washing machine, and that Hot Wheels are more collectible when the wheels aren’t on the other side of the room?  I really don’t need any more bologna-in-the-CD-tray service calls, thank you very much, so I’ll just say “That’s stupid” and continue on my merry way.

Moving towards the second half of the article, I really disagree more with their thinking.  For starters, explain to me why six-year-olds are eligible to be playing games that require interaction with people you don’t know but are connected to instantly?  I fail to see one instance where they won’t be talking to strangers at some point.  (And even if the parents are paying attention, can you really be certain that crazyboy2834 isn’t this guy (potentially NSFW)?  Your son/daughter claiming that it’s the friend from down the street doesn’t count.)  I have a brother that fits this age bracket, and I’ve watched him play similar games.  If someone sends him a friend request, his instant reaction is to accept it…no questions asked.  “But wait, that’s not Kyle?”  Stranger danger, indeed.  What happened to responsible parenting?

I can see maybe a shimmer of reasoning behind giving a twelve-year-old a cell phone…but only a shimmer.  Why, even my high-school-age siblings failed to understand why text messaging wasn’t included in their plan (it is now) and managed to rack up a rather exorbitant bill.  The point is, if you give them something that has the ability to do more than you pay for, it’s going to come back to bite you.  If you really need to give them the phone, get the blasted unlimited messaging plan…$30 per month is a lot more reasonable than $600 (trust me).  Perhaps towards high school would make better sense here.

High school would also be a prime time for these kids to get laptops and other “considered-essential” devices, not as they’re herded off like cattle to college.  Not only does this free the family computer from constant use by the IM- and MySpace-crazed teen, but it gives parents (as if they needed it) yet another thing to take away for groundings.  And has the benefit of teaching them about how to take care of more expensive equipment earlier on.

And I scoff at this comment:

In fact, cellphones are now more or less mandatory for children at this age. Besides providing a social advantage, phones can reduce parental stress in a crowded mall, get children in touch for homework help, serve as a call to dinner — and be withheld as punishment that really works.

Parenting skills for this age include reading phone bills. Lori McCoughey of Mahwah, N.J., a mother of two, saved $200 a month by switching to Verizon’s friends and family plan. There are also pay-as-you-go plans like those from Tracfone (www.tracfone.com). For $50, you get a working LG 225 camera phone, preloaded with 100 minutes. A meter counts down the remaining time.

If parenting skills require reading bills, why must you suggest a pay-as-you go plan on a cell phone, which defeats the entire purpose of reading bills?  It might reinforce and encourage the idea of having your child budget their usage (especially if you add a specific amount per month, and refuse to add any more until the next) in preparation for giving them access to your “big-person”, post-pay plan, but really I can’t see a prepaid phone as being anything more than a cash-cow and waste of time otherwise.  But “serving as a call to dinner?”  Although I’m pretty sure I can see through the poor language there, how is ringing your offspring anywhere near a reinforcement of the “personal nature” of dinner?  (Yes, I realize this is America, where ‘dinner’ is another word for vegging out in front of a television with McDonald’s, but cut me some slack.)

Of course, even my recommendations are just that, recommendations.  In reality, the parents should be capable enough to judge whether their kid actually has a need for the technologies of tomorrow, a need that outstretches the desire to “fit in” – because there’s always going to be someone else without it, and a lesson in not getting everything you want is perfect fare.  Nevertheless, any parents who take tips from that article and apply them probably could use a little help as a parent themselves.

Parenting is about guidance and helping a child to prepare themselves for an adult/parental role, not stepping in and going “Here’s a shiny new electronic toy that I bought; go have fun.”

*Useful in this sense refers to the sense that it could be used for more than running Windows 95 or browsers with the rendering support of an 1800s cash register.  My real first laptop was a 486 obtained long ago from one of my father’s co-workers, with a failed battery and a garbage-picker’s heaven of data left on it.  As most people know, I particularly enjoy older/restored computing equipment and so I keep this machine around for occasional use.

It was with one of these recommendations that I was stopped this morning by my mother asking me if their business PC had IE 5 or greater and “something called JavaScrip” (yes, she missed the ‘T’) installed.  This being a crappy XP rig running (and forever to my shame) AOL 9.1, naturally, it did.  She proceeded to go through a few more steps before the site decided she needed to install several random ActiveX controls to continue – something that never happened.

Running any of these sites through Firefox, or any other alternative browser, you’ll quickly find that they’re not particularly keen on you even visiting them with the “filth that isn’t IE.”  At times, they’ll even make up excuses (like the one displayed here about how JavaScript is a requirement, even though the error message is being displayed using a short user-agent-checking script) just to make sure you turn around, fire up Internet Exploder, and come back riding a piece of Swiss cheese.

You see, at least from my experiences playing with and setting up all of these services for my parents, I’ve found that there’s one thing they all have in common:  They all require Internet Explorer for “compatibility reasons” and each site comes with more effluent to install than AOL itself.  To be honest, it’s quite irritating having to diagnose issues with these, because they have a tendency to go AWOL (not to be confused with the ISP?) all the time.

Let’s take that “compatibility” notion for a moment, mix in the required ActiveX, and analyze it further.  Do you really want to know what a bunch of these controls are for?  Image uploading (and resizing), mere basic text editing…I could go on forever listing this stuff, but essentially it’s all things that could be taken care of in any other manner of more portable, usable manner…and without all of the bloat.  Heck, some of these are even uglier than Windows ME!

It’s pitiful that everyone needs to resort to some client-side browser helper to provide functionality that has long since been capable by more portable methods, such as the use of a Flash or Java applet.  With either of those, there’s plenty of room and cross-platform compatibility to spare, and it wouldn’t tax anything more than it already is.  Flickr, for example, has an excellent upload and management system; while I’m not expecting every little feature of Flickr to show up on in a business tool, it’s at least worth pointing out that there are working, real-life examples with the kind of portability and scalability that these costly services should be striving for.

One would think that, with the growing market share of Firefox, Safari, and Opera, and increasing presence of nearly-fully-capable devices like the iPhone and other smartphones, businesses aimed at enterprises and the employees of those corporations would be falling head over heels to make sure that their platforms worked on as many devices and from as many points of accessibility as possible.  But apparently I’m thinking wrong.  Web 2.0?  Maybe for the personal side of life…but as far as I’m concerned, work is still a version behind.

• The passwords my university requires are much more complex compared to the passwords most people use in their daily lives.
• Most services don’t require password cycles every year, or…ever.
• Since most people keep the same password (or set of passwords) for everything, constantly forcing password changes forces people to forget their password more often since it’s not the same password as other things they use on a daily basis.

While these arguments are perfectly legitimate, the people attempting to use them as rationale against needing to change their passwords also are the same people you find in a typical setting, not groomed in any form of security beyond that of the idea that any password is a surefire protection. (Cue Morpheus’ voice…”Welcome…to the real world.”) Anyway, as part of my research paper, I decided to compare the three pages’ worth of requirements about our university passwords with the requirements used by what I thought to be popular web services. And, after a few hours’ worth of investigative work, I can sympathize with the people who think changing their password is a lot of work. In short, these services, which I thought probably had at least a slight pulse on the idea of security, are grooming their users to be lazy and very unprotective of their data and service access. I’ve put together a table that should at least give an overview of the services I selected (if you have suggestions for more, I can’t promise anything but would welcome the heads-up) and the security procedures they enforce:

The numbers in brackets above correspond to these quick side notes:

1. MySpace’s requirement is an in-between: at least one numeric and one alphabetic character must be included in the password; no requirement is made as to the case of this character, however.
2. Windows Live has two sets of requirements that depend on the services the user accesses. Typically, users only have a six-character requirement, but if necessary due to the requirements of an application they use, Windows Live will force all of upper- and lower-case letters, numbers, and a unique symbol, and mandatory password changes every 72 days. These 72-day password changes are provided as an option to non-qualified users.
3. eBay refused to accept the password ‘aaaaaa’ because it is very poor in security. However, ‘ababab’ works, which means that eBay offers at least a slight security check at registration.

Frankly, I’m very concerned with all of that red, and especially concerned with sites like Amazon, which allow you to store important credit card information in your account for easy checkout, and then allow me to log in with a capital ‘A’. Microsoft even surprises me (though in a good way), if you consider their forced-security dependency to be a good idea. (For once, Microsoft, I like.) Not that these sites and services even compare to the requirements for our university credentials, but it gives you an idea of just how absurd it is. Especially when I throw in the fact that a lot of these places have posted “suggestions” for creating a good and secure password, and then brush them all away in favor of some six-character string. So I apologize if I’m re-iterating what you already know or have seen, but after all of that, I think it’s important that people actually understand what good security is.

• The best passwords are not found in any published or publicly available work, be it a dictionary, your favorite action novel, or some random screenshot you found on Flickr. Don’t use anything important either, like a social security number. And anything personally identifiable or that has a direct reference to your life is out too; that means quit using your aunt’s birthday as a PIN.As one demonstration of coming up with unique but memorable passphrases, try to think of memorable snippets from your favorite written work (you’re probably double-taking right now, but continue reading). Now, develop your own personal algorithm for going through the phrase to select characters (hey, don’t be afraid of punctuation or numbers, because they help too and add uniqueness). For example, try taking the Fibonacci sequence’s digits and pulling those letters out. It sounds tedious now, but if you use the password regularly, your muscle memory will take over and you won’t even realize you’re entering the password anymore. At least, if you use it that regularly.
• NEVER use the same password in more than one place. There IS a reason for this, aside from “the man” trying to confuse you and prevent you from checking your mail; it’s compartmentalized security. If an attacker can compromise one account, and holds a password you use everywhere, you haven’t just handed him one site or a credit card, you’ve handed him your entire life. If that password doesn’t work somewhere else, the attacker’s got to go back to work and start all over again on the new site (if they’re indeed targeting you). If you can’t keep all of your passwords straight, get a trusted and notable password manager, and store your passwords with it. Some suites also provide you the added benefit of randomly-generated passwords like ‘Bs4&nd*D’ – but at the expense that you probably won’t remember them unless you use the application.

Considering these password recommendations are nearly timeless, it only makes me wonder when people are actually going to pay more attention BEFORE something bad happens to them. So quit complaining that you’ve got to change your password. Make it memorable, make it unique, and consider it worthy of a national secret. And for christ sake, ignore the fact that Google isn’t going to check for varied-case characters; force yourself to check for them. And a note to the few, the proud, the WordPress users: WP2.5 RC1 is nice, but I don’t think it’s ready yet. It’s got a few bugs, and I miss my old blue administration panel. I actually think it made more sense doing “Blogroll > Add Link” than “Write > Link” to add things to my blogroll.