Irreal

It appears that kicking the hornet’s nest worked out better for Lisbeth Salander than it has for Sony. The “hacker group” LulzSec has again embarrassed Sony by compromising SonyPictures.com and exposing user data for over one million users. Fortunately for Sony, the group did not have enough computer resources to download the whole database although it did take about 51,000 user records. Unfortunately for Sony, LulzSec has demonstrated once again how clueless Sony is about even rudimentary security. You can read LulzSec’s announcement on Pastebin here.

Consider this:

• The compromise was by an elementary SQL injection attack. How is this possible today? How is it possible especially for Sony who, one would think, would be on the alert after the PSN and subsequent disasters?
• The stolen data included passwords, email addresses, birthdates, and whatever opt-in data, such as telephone numbers, the users included.
• None of this data was encrypted.

All of this suggests that if Sony wants to sue and prosecute people for modding the PlayStation console, they better attend to their security first. Of course, it’s already too late for that. I wonder how many of those users who had their personal information exposed are already talking to lawyers. Sony is very likely to discover that those who live by the lawsuit, die by the lawsuit.

My main machine, at the moment, is a 27 inch iMac. It came with the Magic Mouse, which is an optical mouse that has a multi-touch surface on its top shell. It’s a great mouse and I really like it but I have a glass desk which means that I need to use a mouse pad for the optical tracking to work. That’s a problem because with that giant screen I was always running off the edge of the mouse pad and would have to pick up the mouse to reposition it.

So last weekend I bought a Magic Trackpad. Until I got my MacBook Pro I had always hated trackpads. For some reason the designers of every laptop I had ever used before the MacBook thought it was a great idea to have a tap on the trackpad represent a click. It’s one of those things that sounds good and natural but is terrible in practice. Terrible because it’s very easy to accidently trip the click simulation and yank focus away from whatever window you were working in. Say what you like about Apple but they think about stuff like this so their trackpad implementation was intelligently done. My MacBook is an older model so the trackpad had only limited gestures: a two-finger swipe was a scroll and, of course, the scrolls were inertial to make it easy to move large distances. The Magic Mouse added a gesture that would page forward and backwards in Safari and photos.

The Magic Trackpad has a full set of gestures and is much larger than a laptop trackpad as you can see in the picture.

It’s really easy to move around with it and it doesn’t take up as much room as the mouse pad did. All in all, it’s a giant win for me.

Over at Blog Kindle, Matthew has a post that asks if the Kindle is destroying the publishing industry. Matthew’s main point is that books have always been evolving and are continuing to evolve today. The most significant aspect of the current evolution is the move from physical books to ebooks. As Matthew points out, once you take away the paper, the publishers’ model becomes less sustainable.

Publishers and many authors are fond of pointing out that publishers do a whole lot more than “print books” and that, anyway, the cost of producing and delivering the physical book is not a significant part of the price of a book. Authors, they say, simply aren’t equipped to deal with editing, marketing, and fulfillment and therefore they need the publishers and therefore publishing will go on just as it always has.

But then Cory Doctorow ran his With A Little Help experiment to test those assumptions. Among other things, he found that a mere author can run the whole production cycle and that the oft cited fact of the relative insignificance of the cost of the physical book may not be true. A growing number of authors have reached the same conclusions and are choosing to self-publish directly to Amazon or to a print-on-demand service like Lulu.

None of this means that publishers aren’t useful or that they’re doomed but it does suggest that they should take a lesson from the music industry and try to avoid the same mistakes. In particular, they are going to have to rethink their business models. Just because charging a premium price for a new hardcover book and then reducing the price for the paperback edition a year later worked in the past doesn’t mean that it will continue to work with ebooks. And maybe a little sanity is in order for their pricing models. When I go on Amazon and see that the Kindle version of a book costs more than a physical copy of the same book, I’m insulted. I’m insulted that publishers think I’m so stupid that I’d actually pay a premium for something that costs them less to produce and ship. And I’m not alone. I know the arguments for why this happens but I’m not impressed. All I see is that I’m paying more for something that costs less to produce just so that publishers can protect their business models.

As it happens, I think publishers are useful and I wish them well. But they’re going to have to wake up to the reality that things are changing or they’re going to be disintermediated right out of existence. And it won’t be the Kindle’s fault; it will be theirs. As Matthew says, “We’re moving on.”

A year or two ago I almost completely abandoned paper, pencils, and pens. I made a point of taking all my notes on one of my computers or my iPhone. I removed all the note pads and writing instruments from my desk in an effort to force myself to record everything digitally. It was a little hard to get used to but now it’s second nature. I just pop up an Org capture buffer or even a little electronic “post-it” note (they’re called stickies in OS X) to make a quick note or record a phone number or whatever. I still do mathematical calculations with pencil and paper, write the (very) occasional check, and sign my name to credit card receipts but that’s pretty much it.

Naturally, I’ve accumulated some tools to help me with this. Grocery lists go on gubb.net. During the week we add things to the lists from one of the computers or even an iPhone. When we get to the market the list is available on the iPhone and it’s easy to check off items as we get them. There are plenty of services like gubb but I started using them early on and stuck with them. I track expenses with XpenseTracker, a really nifty little iPhone app that records expenses and allows me to capture an image of the receipt as well. Travel itineraries and reservations are recorded and tracked by Tripit and TravelTracker Pro. I use Evernote to capture and remember notes, Web pages, photos, or virtually anything else. All the data is available on any of my computers or iPhone. I use reQall for quick spoken notes, which are converted to text and emailed to me for disposition when I get back to my computer. All of these apps are either free or nominally priced. All have far more capabilities than I’ve described here.

The next step was to start getting rid of paper that I’d already accumulated and to avoid accumulating more. I moved as many recurring bills as possible to email notification so that I don’t have to deal with paper bills. We pay almost all our bills on-line, which avoids writing checks and dealing with more paper. I bought a cheap but reliable Canon LiDE 100 Scanner to scan any documents or bills that I need to keep.

Yesterday, I stumbled onto a post over at Steve Losh’s blog. In it Losh explains how he went paper-free for $220. Most of that was for a scanner and the rest was for some software to automate scanning and storing documents. It’s a great post and if you have an interest in that sort of thing I really recommend it. Also follow his link to Ryan Waggoner’s post about how he went paperless and filled two dumpsters with shredded documents that he’d scanned. Waggoner recommends the Fujitsu ScanSnap S1500M scanner; it’s pricey but really good for high volume scanning.

One thing that Losh and Wagonner do that I hadn’t thought of is to run OCR on their scanned documents. Then they can be searched for with Spotlight, if you’re on a Mac, or whatever your local equivalent is. That’s a big win because it means you don’t have to decide where to file each document. Losh just dumps them in a single directory called “Dead Trees” and even that is automated. He puts newly scanned documents on his Desktop and his automation setup takes care of running the OCR software, intelligently renaming the file, and moving it into Dead Trees. Once he puts it on the Desktop, no further action is required on his part.

As I said, I really like the OCR idea and intend to implement that here. I’ll probably also implement some sort of automation like Losh’s. The trick to making all this stuff work is to make it as painless as possible so the automation makes sense.