On March 1st, Google will implement its new, unified privacy policy, which will affect data Google has collected on you prior to March 1st as well as data it collects on you in the future. Until now, your Google Web History (your Google searches and sites visited) was cordoned off from Google’s other products. This protection was especially important because search data can reveal particularly sensitive information about you, including facts about your location, interests, age, sexual orientation, religion, health concerns, and more. If you want to keep Google from combining your Web History with the data they have gathered about you in their other products, such as YouTube or Google Plus, you may want to remove all items from your Web History and stop your Web History from being recorded in the future.

https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2012/02/how-remove-your-google-search-history-googles-new-privacy-policy-takes-effect

Sending your password in human-readable form is bad enough if emails are lost or intercepted, but it also indicates that they’re probably not encrypting the passwords in their database.

This way, if they ever get hacked an attacker will be able to read the passwords of all the users and try them against other accounts they may own.

Spectrum Interactive, please read this: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Salt_(cryptography)

We have discovered that our TicketWeb UK direct email marketing system was exposed to unauthorised access. As a result, you may have received up to four emails on Saturday, February the 11th, from an unauthorised party.

The email in question posed as an Adobe newsletter, but linked to a phishing scam. The email goes on:

We have taken immediate action to close the vulnerability. You can rest assured that none of your credit card information was vulnerable during this attack.

It’s not clear if the database was extracted and then used, or if access to their legitimate email systems was gained illegitimately and a scam sent.

It might sound like the most pedantic obsession over minutae, but stuff like this matters.

It matters not just for us user experience people who pore over every detail, but for ‘regular users’ who are forced to approach interface after interface: re-learning the basics over and over because of design decisions made without proper thought.

Here’s the new icon:

Internet Explorer hasn’t had a ‘plus’ icon for years, but it’s part of the tab bar. In Firefox it’s tab-shaped and features a ‘plus’ symbol. The new button in Chrome is a different shape, location and colour to the tabs – how would a first-time user know that this opens a new tab? Even if they work it out, it’s an extra level of cognitive stress that should be totally unnecessary for the user.

If you’re interested in reading more about how complete novices use software, this is a fascinating read, from Jennifer Morrow’s blog:

I find Joe, a 60-year-old hospital cafeteria employee, in the food court looking suitably bored out of his mind. Joe agrees to do a user test, so I begin by asking my standard demographics questions about his experience with the internet. Joe tells me he’a never used a computer, and my eyes light up.

http://jboriss.wordpress.com/2011/07/06/user-testing-in-the-wild-joes-first-computer-encounter/

In the US, we have mandatory “Nutrition Facts” on food labels, couldn’t we implement something similar to convey age, privacy, affiliation, and payment terms for a site or service? Privacy issues are already hard to track and it isn’t getting any easier.

Here’s a startup idea for someone: Parse a website’s TOS to summarize in an easy-to-understand format.

http://clearsignal.posterous.com/do-we-value-our-laundry-more-than-our-privacy

From time to time I come up with ideas which, for whatever reason, I can’t work on right now.

Rather than jealously guarding these ideas, I’m going to post them here in regular bursts, in case someone out there wants to run with them.

Most importantly, sharing your ideas triggers something unexpected: it forces you to come up with new ones.

AutoMarket – grocery shopping, rebooted.

Grocery shopping is a pain. Do it in real life and it’s a nightmare. Doing your shopping online is way more convenient, but once you’re using one supermarket website there’s a large ‘cost of switching’ to set everything up again on a rival site.

AutoMarket would be a managed, clever household grocery service – a layer on top of all the supermarket sites.

From learning your basket and learning the similarities between types of products, it could aggregate your shop over multiple retailers, taking advantage of special offers and delivery discounts, to give you the best possible price.

You could tap items on a tablet to say they’re used and AutoMarket would learn the general frequency of purchases and plan ahead for you. ‘Fire and forget’ shopping.

Revenue could come from retailers vying to be listed and offering promotions.

Peer-to-peer Insurance Exchange

Take on the world of insurance and make it fair, simple and equitable. This would be a platform for matching investors (insurers) with consumers (policyholders). The system could spread risk at both ends of the market.

Revenue could be substantial from just a tiny % of all transactions through the platform – plus the market would find the fairest price possible for customers.

The course is running next on the 27th March 2012 and booking is available here.

Here’s some choice comments from the last course’s feedback:

“Very inspirational.”

Head, top UK financial services firm.

“I came straight back and put a few of the points straight into place today, as they really helped with a couple of issues I’ve been grappling with.”

Director, major global publisher.

“Thoroughly enjoyed it – I have plenty of takeaways too.”

Manager, large government department.

This course aims to guide managers and senior executives through the background of innovation culture, learning tools and techniques, through to implementing these in the organisation.

Course overview at Econsultancy.

From time to time I come up with ideas which, for whatever reason, I can’t work on right now.

Rather than jealously guarding these ideas, I’m going to post them here in regular bursts, in case someone out there wants to run with them.

Most importantly, sharing your ideas triggers something unexpected: it forces you to come up with new ones.

Media-Agnostic Content Engine (MACE)

‘MACE’ would be a new kind of content management system (CMS), or rather a CMS framework, that doesn’t care what kind of content a user throws at it – or what kind of device is requesting it. It would load content from its database, recognise the kind of content (video, image, a product in a store, a location, etc) and re-purpose it on the fly for the device in question (caching popular versions for future use). Open source contributors could add plugins or modules which would allow MACE to deal with new content types and new presentation devices.

With this approach it would be possible to install one CMS and use it to manage video, text, blog posts, products, 360° product images, and so on – across the enterprise from one central web control panel. Furthermore, the system would auto-detect clients and serve an appropriate version of the content to desktop computers, tablets, smartphones, e-readers, etc.

Heavy use of in-RAM caching at the server side could make MACE perform as well as any other CMS as popular ‘reversions’ of content would be kept in memory and addressed with a simple key/value store approach.

Outdoor AdWords

A mesh network of screen media devices connected to an online ‘bid for time’ auction platform.

Companies could bid for display time, add a location, upload their ad content and it would be published and displayed in the real world at roadsides, subway stations, in the street, and so on.

This could open up display advertising to smaller players who couldn’t normally afford the large cost and lengthy bookings of billboard campaigns.

A secondary bidding strategy, similar to Amazon’s ‘spot instances’ would allow more price-conscious advertisers (likely small businesses) to bid on un-used display time and have their ads displayed for as long as the demand remains below their bid price.

My co-founders and I want to use the web to overhaul the payment industry.

Using banking and payments with traditional means is painful, costly and unfair.

It should be easy, more human, even fun.

That’s where we’re heading, using some cutting-edge technology and world-class usability and interaction design.

If you’re interested in finding out more, or helping on the team, email my first name at this domain and we can talk.

I use nano on the command line to tweak config files on remote servers and the strange behaviours have included:

• Characters randomly not registering after the keypress
• Backspace sometimes not deleting a character
• Characters deleting but not showing visually as deleted
• Insert and overwrite randomly switching places

Thanks to this short blog post, it’s now fixed, here’s how:

1. Go to Terminal’s preferences pane and click the ‘Advanced’ tab
2. Change the ‘Declare terminal as:’ drop-down to: xterm-color

Save, restart and reconnect and you should find nano works perfectly.