The Elephant In The Room

Read a very interesting article yesterday that PC sales are down significantly across the board and it's believed that the reason why is that Windows 8 is the main reason why and that many people are just migrating to tablets.

I am not convinced that there is a direct correlation between the two and it could be anecdotal but it does seem clear to me that Windows 8 definitely isn't taking the world by storm.

It seems to me that technology in terms of significant computing is at a crossroads as the industry tries to decide what our platforms will be.

I still remain very pessimistic about tablets becoming the de-facto hardware in business and heavy home usage.  If it does, then I will certainly buy stock in firms relates to products that alleviate Repetitive Strain Injury as this will be a very high growth sector.

The Vestigial Tale of Technology

ves·tig·i·al  

/veˈstij(ē)əl/

Adjective
1. Forming a very small remnant of something that was once much larger or more noticeable: "he felt a vestigial flicker of anger".

2. (of an organ or part of the body) Degenerate, rudimentary, or atrophied, having become functionless in the course of evolution.

Evolution of species is pretty much all about the development of features and body parts that enable that species to grow and become more sophisticated. An example of this would be the opposable thumb which humans and some primates have developed and has been paramount in the development of the species as it has allowed us to hold tools and therefore to build.

Similarly, there are others that are no longer required during the evolution of the species. Evolution has also decided that a species shouldn't expend energy on parts of the body that are no long needed in which case, the body part of feature becomes less significant.

Scientists believe that at all mammals had tails and that as these species evolved their need for a tail was eliminated. Through countless generations, the tail shrank until now; it’s believed that all mammals have a remnant of it – just a nub at the base of the spine that is referred to as the Vestigial Tail.

Recently, I was out with a friend and we were talking about technology and how it impacts our lives. One of the things that I mentioned to her is that one of my concerns with technology sometimes is that it becomes difficult for us to do things on our own and in some cases, we never adapt skills that might be useful as technology does it force us and we’re never forced to learn.

I’ve never learned how to drive a manual transmission because I've never needed to. Here in Canada, I’ve never had a problem getting a car with an automatic transmission. I was stymied when I went to Cuba last year and I just didn’t bother renting a car as they were all manual transmissions. The other example that I was discussing was my concern with these self-parking vehicles. It’s great that they will automatically parallel park but for the novice driver, it makes them completely dependent on a self-parking car because they do not have the skills to do so on their own. Since technology provides this function, there’s no need to learn the fundamental skill. This in turn can inhibit the growth and development of basic skills.

There are many other aspects of our lives where the technology has clearly made our lives easier but by the same token, our lack of ability to perform a task manually will impede us. I made reference to this anecdote in an article a couple of years ago but it completely gets my point across. I was in a store a couple of years ago making a minor purchase, the cost was something like $4.72 so I handed her a $5 bill. The cashier, who was an adult, was perplexed as to what to do as the till was down. She looks at my $5 and the price tag and then the moment of brilliance crosses her mind and she whips out a solar powered calculator to figure out the change. I was stunned that an adult was incapable of such a basic math exercise.

As technology advances it does wonderful things for us. It calculates much more accurately and quickly than I ever could; I still remain concerned which of our skills may become akin to the vestigial tail as a direct result of technology.

I suppose that there would be those that argue and say that these skills are old school and not worth worrying about. Perhaps they’re right. I don’t know how to use an abacus and in all of my years, I can’t remember one time when I said to myself “gosh, I REALLY wish I knew how to flip these beads on this abacus!”.

That having been said, old school is old school, I suppose. I best be more concerned about being the dog that’s able to learn new tricks than to be overly concerned with any technological vestigial tales.

Password Security

I had an experience today which has really caused me some concern with regards to security.  A received a notification from Yahoo stating that one of the email addresses that I do not use was breached, that there was a successful login.  My very first thought is that this was a scam trying to get me to click through on the links to get my password.

I opened up a new tab in my browser and manually went to the Yahoo Mail page and opened up my email.  Sure enough, it was obvious it had been comprised as there were emails in my Sent folder that I did not send.  As a matter of fact, I probably hadn't logged into that email in months.

I'm not so concerned with this email address and I may eventually shut it down, it's basically just a 'portal' to create a Yahoo Messenger account with a little more privacy.  The bigger question is how did this breach happen.  Now, I will say this, the password that I used for this email was a very standard password that I had used in the past on other sites.  However, there would be no way for someone to tie this email account to me, so it's not as if someone knew this password, that they'd be able to associate the password with this email address.

The second thing that I thought of was that maybe I had malware on one of my computers and it had captured the password as I had typed it in and silently emailed it out.  However, it's not that either, as I don't use the email address and probably hadn't logged in, in the past few months.

I then thought that maybe it was a brute force attack using software to generate passwords from the dictionary, but I don't think that's it either, as after a certain number of unsuccessful attempts, the account would have been locked.

I come back to someone, somehow knew not only my password but also the email address which normally wouldn't be associated with me.

This is more than a bit concerning. I think that I will need to go through my login ID and clean them up and start taking password security a little more seriously.

NYC - The Big (Silicon) Apple

Very interesting read by Dave Karpen that I found on LinkedIn this morning and his claim that NYC is the new technological capital of the world.  The article is here.

How accurate and unbiased it is, I can't say yet as I haven't really looked at it in great detail but for so many years California has been the defacto location for high tech.  Whether NYC completely supplants remains to be seen, but somehow, the thought of startup companies and technologies in CA seems a lot sexier than in NY.

South Korea Cyber-Attack

I'm continuing to follow this story as this whole issue of technological vulnerability is of great interest - and concern - to me.

One of the bigger problems that the authorities are having is determining who is behind this major attack on South Korea and it's banking system and television networks.  Apparently, it's estimated that it will take another 5 days to restore functionality and somewhere in the range of 32,000 computers were affected in South Korea.

This is serious stuff and I think it is just the tip of the iceberg.  I'm willing to bet that there are many occasions where there have been similar attacks that have not been publicized for fear of eroding confidence in the technology or services.

Streaming Music

It was with great interest I read an article today talking about how Apple, Google and Amazon are jockeying for position in the online music streaming industry.

Listening to music has always been my thing and what I'm reading has made me reevaluate how I listen to my music.

In the past, I've been pretty much a collector of music and I *gasp* actually pay for it.  I do get teased often as I don't believe in getting ripped off music (insert props to my nephew here - you know who and you know why).  I believe that the artists need to compensated in order to keep the innovation in music going, but I digress.

The thing is that I've always liked the fact that I have a very diverse choice in music and the genres and artists that I listen too change depend on the stages in my life or my mood of the day.

This is where I think the streaming music business model makes a lot of sense of me personally.  This will open up the floodgates to trying all kinds of new music and artists.

The only big problem that I can see (and I hate to harp on this) but this will only work on my devices where I actually have an Internet connection.  I suppose in that case, I'd still have my library of music stored on portable device to listen to.

It also seems to me that in terms of music providers, there seems to be a large amount of brand loyalty and this probably explains why the big players are trying to get people on-board with their music streaming service.

This is definitely worthy of future investigation!

Strategic Warfare

As I mentioned in the Digital Terrorism blog entry, I remain convince that technological warfare is becoming more common.

War, by nature, is impacted by, and evolves through, technology.  As technology advanced, so did the weapons, the defenses and the strategies.

In recent news, there has been a major attack on South Korea's infrastructure (including banks and television stations) and it's widely believed that North Korea is behind the attack.

Unfortunately, this is going to be come increasingly prevalent as a digital attack is significantly cheaper and safer than conventional warfare, let alone that a cyber-attack can be launched regardless of the geographic locations.

I was talking about this concern that I have with my son the other day and the way that I put it to him is that a well throughout cyber-attack - or even a natural disruption of technology - can cripple a society in so many different ways.  It can disrupt banking, medical services and records, send the economy into a tailspin, disrupt vital communications and traffic networks.  The list goes goes on.

This dependency that we have on technology isn't such a great thing when we have this completed dependency on it with very little manual fail-safe built into it.