On this episode of Spark: iPads, fantasy user interfaces, and workplace surveillance. Click below to listen or download the MP3 (runs 54:00).
Play audio:
- John Gruber on Apple’s iPad announcement (full interview)
- Mark Coleran designs fantasy user interfaces (full interview)
- Scott Berkun explains why the future of UI will be boring (full interview)
- Nora mentions Jason Paul’s project LivingCraigslist
- Spark listeners weigh in on earbud etiquette
- Cyrus Farivar investigates workplace internet filtering
- David Zweig researches monitoring in the workplace
- Promo: Andrew McAfee on Enterprise 2.0 (full interview)
This episode features Creative Commons music and sound effects:
- “situation space w/ harmony line 1″ by Max Erwin
- “Jackie & Floyd” by Podington Bear
- “You’re the Apple of My Eye” by the Four Lovers
- Countdown by Corsica_S
- “el mejor amigo del hombre” by airtone
- “A Midsummer Night’s Dream” by Do Kashiteru
- “winterSunlight” by airtone
- “Deep blue (2005)” by Antony Raijekov
- “The Transcendentalist” by Do Kashiteru
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[Original image by Matti Mattila]
Hey Nora,
I was working for Vancouver Coastal Health last year as a computer programmer and your blog reminded me of a really funny incident. As a programmer, I was given unrestricted access to the internet so I can do research on tech and such for the hospital. One of the things my colleagues and I do was to keep track of our programming blogs through Google reader and in a seemingly unrelated coincidence, occasionally Google search page would ask for us to put in a Captcha before we could do any searches. So we'd have a laugh at this and the ineptitude of the network and helpdesk guys to fix it and eventually it would go away. (later I found out because they would drop and renew the hospital wide IP)
I also moved around on projects a lot and every time I moved to a new project and office, sometime in a different suburb, I would use Google reader again and of course Google would eventually post that page with the captcha and I was always wowed at how inept the network guys were that they couldn't figure out how to keep Google from blacklisting their IP.
One day I was back at my home office and one of the Network guys came to my desk and said "I've been instructed to shut down your PC and remove it from the network. Apparently it's pinging Google every 3 seconds!" So I was surprised at this because my PC was not infected with a virus and it dawned on me that Google reader was probably making regular Ajax calls to Google to alert me when new news items were available from my blogs.
So I did some research, testing and some reverse engineering of Google reader's JavaScript and I soon discovered that when you have Google reader (and maybe Gmail too) open, the JavaScript on your page does an Ajax call every few seconds to check to see if there is anything new. You would never know this because the Ajax is all behind the scenes. The best part of this though was that Google's servers thought that the IP the hospital was using outside their firewalls was performing a denial of service attack on Google, hence the captcha on all the searches. And the captcha was pissing off the physicians and residents at the hospital who were searching for God knows what on the internet…
Which lead me to the startling conclusion that the physicians at the hospital I worked at relied on Google for diagnosis… yikes!
or for the more tech minded… Why did Google think It's own code was performing a denial of service attack on itself using it's own JavaScript from it's own site? I stopped using Google reader at work and all went back to normal.
Um, one more thing. I was thinking of how to share my favorite blog posts on my own blog with the most minimal amount of work (did I mention I was a programmer lol) and I found that I can "share" my favorite posts using Google reader. Then I used the syndication plugin for wordpress to syndicate my google reader share feed and now my blog posts my favorite blog entries as Contributors to my blog. This should go on your podcast a while back about lazy bloggers who can't bother to even write tweets. BTW I also committed web2.0 suicide because of one of your podcasts. Thanks. P
Blocked sites: Are you aware of The Onion Router (http://www.torproject.org), the Torbutton extension for Firefox and anonymous remailers (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anonymous_remailers), like Mixminion (http://www.mixminion.net/)? These tools could help one get around internet access restrictions.
Gesture Recognition
Does Dilbert’s Wally’s response to the advent of Voice Recognition apply (“FORMAT C:”, “Y”)?
Will there be a Meta-gesture that will begin or end gesture recognition, or will I have to reserve some gestures for the computer?
Gesture recognition is another demand on the limited communication bandwidth between my mind and the computer. What can I do better/easier with gesture recognition?
Synchronicity: I'm taking a coffee break, listening to your show … Cyrus Farivar and "workplace internet filtering". What am I working on (yes, from home, on the weekend)? Transcribing an interview with the CIO of a major trans-national on the subject of compliance with privacy and security in context of collaborative social media.
Ubiquitous mind!
Hi Nora,
While listening to your show on the weekend, I found it hard to believe that your guest was lamenting the lack of facebook time at work. I guess she must have missed whole 'work ethics' lecture at school. Checking facebook and " women's issue sites" is not work, it is leisure. Leisure happens after work hours. The employer has no obligation to indulge the whims of employees.
Furthermore, I found it a sad commentary that your guest choses to surf facebook at lunch, rather than get outside or interact with real people.
Get a life!
Kathie
When listening to people talking about email being read by the company owners, I smiled. I'm currently on contract with Agriculture Canada and all my emails are available under ATIP request.
Hi Nora,
I listen to all Spark episodes with great interest. The interview with the gentleman from Websense particularly caught my attention; I was recently caught by my employer’s network police for traffic they didn’t like.
My offense was running Skype over the company network.
My reason for using Skype: We had been through several years of serious cost cutting. I was working on a project in Germany, form Ontario. Travel was prohibited. Home office telephones had been cut. Office environmental systems are turned off at night and don’t come on till 7:00am. So, how do I attend conference calls from 3:00am (9:00am in Germany) to 7:00am? Skype seemed to be the answer.
The problem was that the company also likes to use desktop sharing (NetMeeting) over the internal corporate network on most of our teleconferences. As a result, I had to connect to the corporate network via VPN before joining each teleconference. When I ran Skype, the Skype traffic went over the corporate network and out through the corporate firewall to the internet. The corporate internet filter eventually detected my Skype traffic.
The solution: My employer gave me a second computer – one just for Skype – that I could connect to my home WiFi.
A corporate network has a lot of items thieves can steel: Purchase Authorization codes, promo and discount codes for merchandise and services; items that thieves can target by exploiting any weakness in any other communication application not designed to support business strength security. That very effective expense tracking app could harbour a worm targeted at business assets.
The bottom line: The internet filter is not intended to protect my productivity. It is intended to protect the productivity and security of the corporate network. I have since seen a growing number of the companies I visit that run an internet-only WiFi service – in addition to the wired corporate network – throughout their offices – specifically so that employees can connect their Smartphones to the internet without going through the corporate network.
Conclusion: The comment that social network apps, and personal email on iPhone will soon frustrate the goals of internet filtering is not true. Some employers do care what their employees do in their downtime at work … But… Many companies will be happy with employees experimenting with social networks at work as long as the traffic does not travel over their corporate network.
Cheers
Some mixtures of corporate policies don't make sense. I've been on client sites that had filtered Internet, but also mandated that everyone use Microsoft Office, Outlook and Internet Explorer on the desktop. Due to ongoing incompatibilities with some cheap desktop applications they didn't keep security patches for these exposed applications up-to-date and often had versions that were 6 or higher months out of date. It's not wise to run unpatched Microsoft software too many days past a patch-Tuesday.
Filtering Web traffic at the firewall seems silly when you allow PDF files to be attached in email, and not only allow but mandate people use the Adobe Acrobat reader to read them. With recent versions of Windows finally having some security built in, and people moving away from IE and Outlook, Adobe is becoming the larger attack surface.
I regularly enjoy Spark, but oh man, I was so disappointed to tune in and hear yet more blah blah about Apple, iPad, and Apple's business model. As Nora herself said – "Spark is not a show about gadgets". The discussion of interfaces of the future was great, but the intro about the iPad was so irritating given the media overload on this topic.
Thanks and keep up the (generally) great work!
I hate everything Apple, simply because people tend to buy into it so easily without giving much thought to the quality of the product they are getting. There are so many other options for MP3 players, phones and even tablets that are far superior to anything Apple has produced. I don't like the attention they get from the media because it makes it seem like their products are more relevant than they really are.
I love Spark but, I too was a little put off by the attention given to the already over-hyped iPad.
Sorry for the late post, but I am catching-up on my Spark episodes.
Keep in mind that one motivation for employers to keep track of their users' activities is protection against liabilities for employees on-line actions. If an employee does something illegal or in violation of terms of use, the employer – acting as an ISP – could be held liable for such activity. Whether it is illegal downloading, threatening or pornographic e-mail or inadvertent denial of service attacks – it all could be laid at the employer's doorstep.
What if such actions present friction between employees, then the employer is responsible for creating or fostering a hostile work environment.
So there are circumstances that could force an employer to monitor employees online activities. Remember it is an investment of time, resources and money that an employer may not be too thrilled to part with.
Sorry for the late post, but I am catching-up on my Spark episodes.
Keep in mind that one motivation for employers to keep track of their users' activities is protection against liabilities for employees on-line actions. If an employee does something illegal or in violation of terms of use, the employer – acting as an ISP – could be held liable for such activity. Whether it is illegal downloading, threatening or pornographic e-mail or inadvertent denial of service attacks – it all could be laid at the employer's doorstep.
What if such actions present friction between employees, then the employer is responsible for creating or fostering a hostile work environment.
So there are circumstances that could force an employer to monitor employees online activities. Remember it is an investment of time, resources and money that an employer may not be too thrilled to part with.