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Weekly Wrap 164: A turn-around, with Finnish jelly beans

Glimpse of Sydney Central: click to embiggenMy week Monday 22 to Sunday 28 July 2013 was initially as unproductive as the previous two, but Thursday marked a turning-point. Thank the gods. No details.

Articles

Podcasts

None, but I did plenty of behind-the-scenes work on the Corrupted Nerds website, including settling on Cryout Creations’ Mantra theme for WordPress as the design framework.

This fixed a very, very annoying bug that I’d encountered in some other themes that broke the RSS feeds in Blubrry’s PowerPress Podcasting Plugin for WordPress, and that in turn meant that I couldn’t add the podcasts to Apple’s iTunes store.

Having removed that roadblock, I’ll be able to add more material to Corrupted Nerds very soon — including two new episodes in the coming week.

Media Appearances

None.

Corporate Largesse

The Week Ahead

On Monday I’ll complete a catch-up edition of my ZDNet Australia column, The Full Tilt, with something that’ll probably annoy quite a few people who call themselves geeks, and then spending the afternoon in Katoomba. Somewhere in there I’ll fire up that Nokia Lumia 925.

On Tuesday I’ll write a piece for Technology Spectator, one that’s been on the back burner for a while, and completing a new episode of Corrupted Nerds: Conversations podcast. The forecast is for a rainy day, so that’s perfect.

On Wednesday morning I’ll head into Sydney to attend a media event with Vodafone Australia at 1030, then the rest of the week becomes some what flexible — although I know it include a medical appointment in Sydney, another column for ZDNet Australia and some planning.

The weekend is currently unplanned.

[Photo: Glimpse of Sydney Central, being a view of the clock tower at Sydney’s Central station, taken early one winter morning from the Metro Sydney Central hotel.]

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Do McAfee’s new cyberstats really represent a shift?

Composite image of ZDNet column headline and McAfee report title: click for ZDNet columnAs brokers of reliable information about the scale of online crime and espionage, most information security vendors would make great used car salesmen — but McAfee’s latest research finally seems to be taking the right path.

In my column at ZDNet Australia this week, I give McAfee some praise for the most recent research they’ve funded, a preliminary report from the Washington-based Center for Strategic and International Studies titled The Economic Impact of Cybercrime and Cyber Espionage that dismantles the daft idea that cyberstuff costs the global economy a trillion dollars a year.

McAfee now admits that you can’t run a small-N survey in a couple dozen large, wealthy nations — often a self-selected sample of known crime victims at that — and extrapolate the data globally.

Their new figure is “probably measured in the hundreds of billions of dollars”, although they never quite commit to one specific number…

“In the context of a $70 trillion global economy, these losses are small, but that does not mean it is not in the national interest to try to reduce the loss, and the theft of sensitive military technology creates damage whose full cost is not easily quantifiable in monetary terms,” McAfee writes.

True, but as McAfee themselves point out, this supposed cybercrime explosion is really down at the level of shoplifting. Retailers generally budget between 0.5% and 2% for pilferage and other such “shrinkage”.

I also mention my previous critical comments about various infosec vendors’ dodgy statistics — but I don’t link to them, because they were mostly published at non-CBS mastheads. So here’s a selection of stories I’ve written on this subject over the last couple of years.

Continue reading “Do McAfee’s new cyberstats really represent a shift?”

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There is no Weekly Wrap 163

My week Monday 15 to Sunday 21 July 2013 is not being recorded here. In any event, no media objects were produced, so there’s nothing of importance to link to.

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Weekly Wrap 162: A dog, a pause, and an invisible cat

Sunday night in the village: click to embiggenMy week Monday 8 to Sunday 14 July 2013 was a continuation of my distinct slow-down, for reasons explained previously.

I still haven’t decided whether I’ll write about that any further. For now, I’ll just say that there’s been suitable initial progress on that front. Many thanks to the people — friends, colleagues and strangers alike — who’ve been in touch.

Meanwhile, as usual, here’s the media-related things I’ve done this week. Not that there were many.

Podcasts

None.

Articles

Media Appearances

Corporate Largesse

None. Well, there was some on offer, but I declined. I have heard rumour which suggest that I made the wrong decision.

The Week Ahead

The theme for the coming week is “assessment”. I’ll be be running through the various areas of my life to see where I’m up to, what issues I should perhaps address, and what the possibilities for the future might be. Personal stuff, including my health. Work, both media-related and otherwise. All sorts of stuff. I haven’t done that for a while. I’ve just been cruising along.

In between, I’ll be writing for Technology Spectator and ZDNet Australia, and perhaps some others. I’ll also post another episode of the Corrupted Nerds podcast, fix some problems with the website, and sketch out my ideas for making that a sustainable project.

On Thursday I’ll be down in Sydney for a medical appointment and lunch with a friend. Whether I’ll be staying in Sydney longer than that remains to be decided.

[Photo: Sunday night in the village, being the near-deserted Station Street, Wentworth Falls, earlier this evening.]

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Rydges’ daft website contact form

Rydges contact form: click to embiggenThis week’s award for daft user interaction design goes to Rydges, the chain of hotels and resorts, for their incredibly silly website contact form.

Web contact forms can sometimes be useful, I suppose, if a business receives a lot of standard enquiries, because they can capture the structured data and put it straight into the customer relationship management (CRM) system. But most of these forms just dump the form data into an unstructured email, and dump that into some poor soul’s inbox. Why not just publish an email address? Are your spam filters that shoddy?

But when contact forms have badly-worded multiple-choice options, ill-thought-out data validation code, or unworkably small data fields, they make things difficult for everyone — and this one’s got the lot.

According to Rydges, you must have a title, but it can only be “Mr”, “Mrs”, “Ms” or “Miss”, not “Dr” or “Rev” or anything else. Your name must consist of two words. Your phone number cannot start with the “+” that comes before the country code, odd for an international business, nor may it contain spaces. And the “Type of enquiry” drop-down has only two choices, “Business” or “General”.

Is a question about the hotel restaurant’s opening hours, for example, “Business” or “General”, I wonder?

But the pièce de résistance is that the body text is limited to just 200 characters. That’s about 30-odd words of standard English text. Good luck with that.

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Weekly Wrap 161: The black dog and the prodigal umbrella

Sydney Harbour, viewed through a dirty window in the AMP Tower: click to embiggenMy week Monday 1 to Sunday 7 July 2013 was another complicated one, as already explained. That’s why this post is very late, of course.

Once I’d gotten the bigger chunks of work out of the way, I pulled the pace back a bit — which I think you’ll agree was sensible.

I was also pleased to see the return of the prodigal umbrella. The excellent umbrella I was given by Verizon Business in Singapore had been left at a noodle bar months ago — but the owners remembered it and me. We were reunited last Wednesday. Also, pho was served.

Podcasts

None.

Articles

Media Appearances

  • On Friday, I was interviewed for a segment on Channel TEN’s The Project. However it didn’t air until Monday 8 July, so it’ll get its own blog post shortly, and be included in next week’s wrap.
  • On Sunday I was a guest on Reckoner episode three, as already explained.

Corporate Largesse

The Week Ahead

It’s almost over, so I’ll just mention that I’ll be writing for ZDNet Australia tomorrow, Friday, and I’ll be returning to the Blue Mountains on Sunday, probably.

[Photo: Sydney Harbour, viewed through a dirty window in the AMP Tower, photographed on 2 July 2013.]