Even before I was given a Kindle, I was vaguely interested.  I use my local library a lot, and review and annotate stuff on their new system.  Recently the library has been pushing the fact that ebooks are available for borrowing.  In fact, they had a meeting about e-readers (which, worse luck, I was unable to attend), and even have some e-readers as loaners.

So, when I got the Kindle, the library site was one of my first stops.

It was not an unqualified success.

First of all, my local library has no ebooks for loan.  The actual ebooks seem to be loaned by the BC Libraries system.  I say “seem to,” because the actual ebooks, and the system for controlling them, seems to be run by an American outfit called OverDrive.  This becomes important once you start looking for titles and ebooks.  There is Kindle compatible material, but none of it is available in Canada.  (Which seems very odd when the site is supposed to be about the “BC” libraries.)

There are a very large number of ePUB format titles.  There are even some that appear to be free for the taking.  I tried one, converted it to .MOBI, and it seemed to work OK.

For the actual loan books, I placed a hold.  The hold came in.  I read the directions on the “Check Out Assistance” link.  I installed Adobe Digital Editions (ver. 1.7.2.1131) (even though I am, as a security specialist, really uncomfortable with Adobe products) in order to be able to return the item.  I “downloaded” the item to Adobe Digital Editions.  It now appears in my “library” on Adobe Digital Editions.  However, the way to “return” the item required help from a library tech, and it definitely is not intuitively obvious.  Oh, and it definitely won’t convert to Kindle format.

I guess I have to go to other sources.

Having been given a Kindle, what does one do with it?

Unless you have a Kindle Keyboard (a different model, with a keyboard about the size of that for a slide phone or Blackberry across the bottom of the screen), as noted, the virtual keyboard is a pain, so you aren’t going to do much writing.  That leaves reading.

First of all, then, you have to get some books to read.  You can copy them onto the Kindle, from your computer, with the USB cable.  I’ve done that now, and it works quite well.  Plug it into the computer, wait for the computer to read the device driver, and it shows up simply as a USB drive.  You can put files into the “My Documents” folder, and they show up on the device.  (You can also copy any or all of the “books” on the Kindle onto your computer, as backup.  Oddly, most ebooks seem to have four files associated with them, once you start reading them.)  I’m a bit loath to do the cable connection randomly just now, since, also as noted, plugging into a USB port on a computer starts charging, and, even though it’s a lithium polymer battery, I’d just as soon give it a few full cycles before I start messing with battery memory.

You can use the wireless connection in two different ways.  You can “shop” at the Amazon store.  Or, you can find your own files and ebooks, and email them to your Kindle.  When you set up, the device is assigned an email address.  You can find this under the “Settings” entry of the menu from the home page.  Find an ebook that you want, and send the file, as an attachment, to that address.  The next time the Kindle is attached to the net, you can sync, and that file will be downloaded to your device.  (If it doesn’t show up on the home page, it may be under the “Archived Items” section.  For some reason, some files seem to go there, possibly if the download isn’t complete.)

When I did some testing of the email-to-Kindle function, it generally worked well.  However, in my early tests, about half of the text files, and about a third of the .PDFs, didn’t come through.  I tested sending multiple files (four, all text) as attachments in a single message.  Two of them came through, and the other two never did.

So, you can just get any ebooks, right?  Well, not quite.  The Kindle seems to be fairly limited in this regard.  You can get ebooks from Amazon, of course.  These are indicated by an .AZW extension.  In terms of the ebook standards, you can also get and read .MOBI files.  (.MOBI and .AZW are apparently the same format, except that .AZW are locked by Amazon.  You can get some utilities to unlock and convert them, but I haven’t done a lot of testing with that yet.)  The Kindle can handle text files, but, of course, they don’t have any formatting.  Kindle says it can handle HTML, and that is partially true.  You can send an HTML file, and it will come through.  But it doesn’t render: you simply see the text of the file, HTML code and all.

Kindle says it can handle .PDF, although it also says this is experimental or beta.  It doesn’t support links within a .PDF, but it does support extracting text from a PDF (as long as it really is text, and not an image), which I found handy, and just a little surprising.  It does not, of course, handle locked or password protected files.

And it does not handle .ePUB format, which is a real nuisance.

If you want to use a Kindle, you have to get books onto it.  It does come with a USB cable, and you can load books from your computer.  I haven’t tried that yet, because the USB cable also charges the battery, and, in the interests of battery life, I’ve wanted to let the battery pretty much completely discharge before I charged it up again.  I’ll let you know how that works later.  (This also gets into the issue of ebook formats, and I’ll get into that later, too.)

Right off the top, probably the quickest and easiest way to get books onto your Kindle is if you can connect to the Internet via Wi-Fi.  As previously noted, if you have a private network and know the password, it can be a pain to enter, but you are in.  If you are in a Wi-Fi hotspot, things can get a bit trickier.

You can try and “Shop in Kindle Store.”  You can “Sync & Check for Items.”  (Both of those are on the “home” page menu.)  Maybe it will work.  Maybe it won’t.  Neither of them like hotspots that do redirection.  Many times they will simply tell you that the function requires a network connection.  (Sometimes the Kindle will tell you that the function requires a network connection, but you will also see indications that books are actually being downloaded.  It’s hard to tell for sure whether you are connected and can actually do anything.)
The Kindle 4 (my version) has a Web browser, which you can get to via the home page menu, under the “Experimental” entry.  It definitely is experimental.  It will not open links, if those links are set to open in new frames, tabs, or windows.  (It tells you that it can’t open the link because it doesn’t support multiple windows, rather than just opening it anyway.)  If the hotspot does redirection, the browser might go to the redirected page if you ask it to connect to a site, or reload a page.  On the other hand, sometimes you will try to fire up the browser in order to connect at a hotspot, and the Kindle will tell you that it can’t open the browser because you don’t have a net connection.  Helpful, that.

(The Kindle seems to ship with the wireless enabled and on.  I tend to turn it off, when I’m not actually downloading or “shopping,” in order to a) save battery, and b) keep from radiating all over the place.  I don’t know how many people will know that they can turn it off from the home page menu.

What I have is a Kindle 4.  I assume the “4″ stands for some level of the software.  Having done my initial exploration, I vaguely remembered having seen that it was a model D01100.  (Eventually I found that reference again: it was buried in the appendix to the “Kindle User’s Guide.”  I assume it’s less important than the Kindle 4 part.)

When you start out, the Kindle wants you to go through a registration process.  Being in a place with a Wi-Fi network, I did.  (This version of Kindle doesn’t have a keyboard.  It does have a virtual keyboard, which is usable, but difficult.  Entering a 26 character hex password was a bit of a pain.)  I have had an account with Amazon, so, when it asked if I wanted to use one or create one, I guessed at my old username and password.  It did seem to work; at least it let me start working on the Kindle, but somehow it didn’t pick up my “Registered User:” name.  At some point something must have figured out who I was, because the “Send-to-Kindle” email address (I’ll get back to that) did have my name in it.

On the first screen you see after the registration process (I later learned it was the “home” screen) there was an entry for a “Kindle User’s Guide,” and I believe it was the entry highlighted.  Being a “read the manual” type person, I read it.  It starts out by saying that it’s short and informative and can be read in 10 minutes.  Hah!

It starts out with charging the battery.  This would seem to make sense, except that a) like most battery-powered devices these days it comes charged, and b) if it wasn’t charged, you couldn’t read the manual, now could you?  It then shows you the physical layout and buttons.  Including the power button.  The power button is not intuitively obvious on first glance: one of the people who gave it to me had to show me where it was.

The Kindle has a “5-way controller.”  This should be familiar to most people who have a cell phone that still has buttons: a centre “select/enter” key, surrounded by left, right, up, and down arrow keys.  The user guide mentions that you can get around menus and text with it.  It doesn’t mention that the left and right keys have context sensitive functions that are not immediately obvious.  The Guide did mention that, when a book is highlighted, using the left key brings up an offer to delete the item.  However, it mentions a lot of other stuff, and I missed that.  (Fortunately, I did not encounter this until I had learned that the “Back” key acts as a combination of “last page visited” and “Esc.”

There is a menu button.  It is context sensitive, and will bring up, or dismiss, menus appropriate to the screen you are in.  There are lots of different menus.  It is not obvious which menu will bring up a function you may want.  This is also a good place to mention that one thing that I believe I can state, without fear of contradiction, is a major error in the design of the Kindle user interface.  There is no rollover.  Menus are limited in length, as are entries in the “home” page or your “collections” of ebooks.  Actual pages in an ebook can be much longer.  Menus tend to have the “active” item fairly near the middle.  (After a while you begin the realize that the most important and useful functions are going to be near the middle, not the top, of a menu.)  Pages always start from top left.  In either case, there is no rollover: no return off the top of a page or menu to the bottom, or off the bottom to the top.  There is no wraparound going off the right side of the page to come back in on the left, or vice versa.  (There is one exception to this” the virtual keyboard.  It doesn’t wrap top to bottom, but it does wrap side to side.)

One other problem related to the menus: the time, battery power, and Wi-Fi indicator only show when you have a menu open.  You can’t even tell the time on the home page unless you bring up a menu.  (Interestingly, when I got mine, the time was set for a time zone either four or sixteen hours later than the one I’m in.)

The User’s Guide takes a lot longer than 10 minutes to read.  It does contain a lot of information, but a great deal of it will not make much sense until you have explored the device a bit.  So you are going to have to read it at least twice.  And probably keep it around for reference.

The Girls, who have been having a grand time in recent years finding interesting high tech goodies that I never even knew existed, got me a Kindle for Christmas.  So, of course, I’m going to review the Kindle.

I had been putting off the idea of getting one for myself.  I do a lot of reading, but that’s primarily because I do a lot of reviewing, and for that you need the ability to make notes, and transfer said notes back to the computer for writing up.  So far, I haven’t seen an awful lot that convinces me the e-readers are there yet.

But, I do have to say that, right off the top, the idea of having 60 books (so far) in something that is lighter than a paperback definitely has its attractions.  So far I’ve been able to load the Bible, some tech articles, my own security dictionary, a dozen Sherlock Holmes stories, Don Quixote (both of which I have read), The Divine Comedy, War and Piece (both of which I intend to read–sometime), a fair amount of poetry, and an egalley for Bruce Schneier’s latest (sent along by his publicist).

Unfortunately, all this fun exploring has me somewhat behind in news and email, so I’ll have to start putting together my observations of the Kindle, itself, a bit later.

Complexity is the enemy of security.

I always emphasize that point in the app sec domain when we have those two adjacent slides showing the old system/application environment, and the new.  I also point out that the “new” is now rather old.  When trying to update that slide I came up with eleven different levels without half trying.  Then, of course, you have to add bi-directional arrows between all adjacent components, and between all components on a given level, and between most components on adjacent levels.  Gets convoluted real fast.

Went to a real-time/component trade show recently, and was talking to some people who did embedded systems.  One of their promotional handouts shows a model that has six layers.  (And, of course, you have to add bi-directional arrows between all adjacent components, etc.)  And that’s just for “simple” embedded devices.

We seem to have lost the KISS battle a long time ago.  I guess now we have to try for KIASAPS (Keep It As Simple As Possible, Stupid).

A few interesting … “undocumented features” of Windows 7 observed in the last couple of days.

One is that Windows 7 seems to have a great deal of difficulty remembering the window settings (placement, size, full screen, etc.) for non-Microsoft software.  Not terribly important, perhaps, but greatly annoying, and new to Windows 7.  (XP had some faults in that regard, but nothing like Win7.)

I plugged in one of my cameras this morning.  Normally this would just be plug and play.  However, I couldn’t find any entry for it in Windows Explorer, even though the computer had said that the new device was found, and the driver successfully installed.  Unplugged and plugged again, and it still wouldn’t play.  Finally went looking for devices and printers, and, under removeable storage it simply did not appear.

However, I noticed that one of the other devices had an oddly familiar name.  When I clicked on that, I noticed that one of my mapped network drives was no longer that network drive, but the camera.  Very odd.

(I must say that, once I found out [via Google, not Microsoft Help] how to access it, I very much appreciated the fact that you no longer have to go through contortions to get yourself a command prompt function via Windows Explorer.  A “Shift-context menu” seems a bit arcane, though …)

Having gotten some of the software and XP Mode problems out of the way, I now need to install some of the old (and some new) hardware to the new desktop.

The HP LaserJet P1005 installed just fine as soon as it was plugged in.

I suspected that the Epson Stylus CX6400 wasn’t going to be quite so simple, since I recalled having to run the install software before I connected it the last time.  And, yes, sure enough, the installation software (once I found the old CD and instructions) didn’t run under Windows 7.

So, off to Epson.  I checked under Drivers and Support, specified my “All-in-One” (it’s get a printer, a scanner, and some memory card readers), and asked for Windows 64-bit drivers.

Now out of Epson EasyPrint v3.10, ICM Color Profile Module Update v1.20, TWAIN Driver and EPSON Scan Utility v3.04A, TWAIN Driver and EPSON Scan Utility v2.68A, and Printer Driver v5.5aAs which would you pick?  Yeah, I didn’t know either, and the descriptions weren’t an awful lot of help.  But I knew (from the dim and distant past) that TWAIN (we used to say that it stood for “Technology Without An Interesting Name) had something to do with scanners, and the v2.68A was listed for 64-bit only, so I chose that.

It ran.  After a while I got the scanner part of the Windows Fax and Scan program.  It didn’t have many options.  Epson Scan had been installed, but it insisted that it couldn’t run, and Epson Scan Settings insisted the scanner wasn’t installed.  I used the troubleshooter (seemingly provided by Epson) but it was no help.  I rebooted the computer: that was no help.  I tried help and searching on the Epson site: you guessed it, no help.

I did some Google searching.  Found a mention of device drivers, and having to uninstall the Microsoft brand, and install the proper Epson driver.

Well, thought I, I installed this with installation and setup stuff from Epson: surely Microsoft wouldn’t have messed it up in that short time.  But I had a look at Device Manager anyway.

And, lo and behold, the driver that was installed was signed by Microsoft.  Uninstalled that, searched the disk for related drivers, found two.  One was for CX6300/CX6400, and one just for the CX6400, so I installed the latter, on the theory that the more specific was more likely to be from Epson.

And now Epson Scan is happy to run.

(I also installed the original XP software from the CD within XP Mode.  That didn’t work …)

I think I may finally be getting the hang of this XP Mode thing.  (I may also be fooling myself …)

As previously noted, XP Mode doesn’t access the “real” drive, but a virtual drive which is contained in one large file.  (Actually, seemingly a minimum of three, but only one appears to contain the drive “contents.”)  XP Mode does provide you with links to the real drives on the computer, but, while accessible from most Windows programs, since they are not mapped to drive letters, you cannot do anything with DOS programs, even though such programs run under XP Mode.

I figured I would have to create the directories, with files I wanted to work on, within the “virtual” drive, and, each time I made any modifications, remember to copy the new versions back to the “real” disk so they could be used under Win7.  Not only is this a nuisance, but it wastes disk space.  XP Mode takes up enough space as it is: starting at about 1.5 gig, by the time you get it up to speed with Windows updates, it has ballooned to 6 or 7 gig.  Any programs or file space you want come on top of that.  (And, since I no longer trust XP Mode to stay stable, I have been making backup copies as I have been doing the updating and adjusting of the virtual machine, wasting even more disk space.)  An annoyance, to say the least.

I can’t remember where I found it, but somehow I noted a reference to the actual description, within XP Mode, of the links to the real drives.  It looks just like a network reference to a shared resource.  So I tried mapping that format and creating a DOS “lettered” drive mapping (from within XP Mode).  So far it seems to work fine.

For those who’d like to try, the “network” name of the real computer seems to be TSCLIENT.  So, in order to create a link to the C: drive on the real computer, map to \\TSCLIENT\C .  (It does not seem to matter what your real machine’s name is, that name does not seem to be used in the reference.)

Well behaved anitvirus programs can safely work together in peace and harmony.

Unfortunately, relatively few AVs are well behaved.

On my new desktop, I’ve got Avast (came with the machine, has a free version, and is a pretty good product) and MSE (it’s free, and it’s pretty safe for most users, although, as a professional, some parts of it irk me).  I’ve set both to ignore the virus zoo, although they aren’t too good at taking that restriction to heart.

MSE quarantined a few samples before I got things tuned.  Of course, it doesn’t have any function to get stuff out of “quarantine.”  (As I say, as a professional this is irksome, but, considering the average user, I’d say this is a darn good thing.)

Today Avast gave me a warning of some dangerous files.  They were the ones MSE quarantined.

(In case anyone is interested, the quarantine seems to be in \ProgramData\Microsoft\Microsoft Antimalware\LocalCopy.)

In researching the purchase of the new desktop, I found/was told/noted that you needed Windows 7 Pro version for “XP compatibility.”  Naturally, I assumed that this would be built into the product that I bought.  (Actually, I was a bit worried by that statement, since one would assume that a new version of an operating system would still run stuff that the old one did.  I still use programs that I first ran on MS-DOS 2, and they were still working fine on XP.)

Not so.

Well, I’m sure that Microsoft would take issue with that statement.  After all, when you try to use the “recommended settings” when troubleshooting compatibility, it tells you that it is running “Windows XP (Service Pack 2)” compatibility mode.  (Pretty much regardless of what the program or utility is.)  And if, trying the more manual troubleshooting, you tell the troubleshooting program that it did run under previous versions of Windows, there are XP SP2 and XP SP3 options (among nine others) to choose from.

It doesn’t matter which you choose.  I haven’t found any of them to work with any program to date.

However, the advice to buy Win7 Pro is sound, if you want to have much of a chance of running anything (interesting) that you have been using up until now.  You absolutely must have XP Mode.  It solves all your problems.  (Well, it solves a bunch of problems, and you can probably fix the rest with some scripting, which is annoying, but better than nothing.)  You have XP Mode if you buy Win7 Pro.

Well, no you don’t.

XP Mode turns out to be part of Windows Virtual PC.  You don’t have it with the base install.  You have the right to have it, but you don’t have it, and you have to download it and install it.  In trying to find out why I couldn’t run stuff that had run perfectly well under XP, I found a mention in the Help system, which made me realize this was a possiblity.  Sure enough, chasing this mention down through a few related help articles, I found a link to go and get it.  So I did.

Well, I tried.  In order to install Windows Virtual PC, Microsoft wants to run MGA.  MGA stands for Microsoft’s Grasping Authenticator.  Microsoft disputes this, and refers to it as Microsoft Genuine Advantage, but there is absolutely no advantage to you, the user, in MGA.  There definitely is an advantage to Microsoft, because, if you need MGA to run or install something, and anything at all goes wrong, you have to pay Microsoft to get it fixed.  Even if you’ve paid already.  I had no fear of MGA, because a) I knew that it was a genuine product, and b) I’d already had to run MGA to get the updates to work, and it hadn’t blinked.  This time, however, it would not believe that my Win7 Pro was Win7 Pro, and would I please cough up an extra $200.

(I took it back to the store I bought it from.  They got it fixed, for no money, but it did take them two days to do it.  And all my passwords were gone.  Oh, you thought passwords were there to keep people out of your computer?  Silly you.)

So now I have Windows Virtual PC, and XP Mode with it.  And, absent the fact that it creates a virtual disk for itself, and that, if you want to work on anything on your real disk you probably have to copy it on to this virtual disk, and mess around with settings, it runs everything just fine.  Per my previous posting on compatibility, Netscape/Communicator 4.8 works.  Eudora 1.5.2 works.  My beloved WordPerfect 4.2 (yes, that old) works.  So does WordPerfect 5.1, which is what Gloria prefers.  (I’m not sure I’m going to go to all the trouble of setting up the system that allows us to print from WordPerfect to a winprinter: we really only need to get at the files for reference purposes.)  Good stuff.

I did have to do a whole bunch of Windows Updates on XP Mode itself, which seems very strange to me.  Seeing as how I was downloading it from Microsoft, couldn’t they keep it patched and up to date?  Three or four sessions with Windows Update, and something close to a hundred updates by the time it seemed to settle down.

Ceterum censeo Microsoft esse delendam.

It took me about a month or so to create my first hard, no-you-can’t-recover-with-Ctrl-Alt-Del, pull-the-plug-and-hope-the-filesystem-isn’t-trashed crash on Win NT.  It took longer than that for XP.

Three days after installing, taking a break and watching an amusing little video, Win7 crashed.  Black screen.  Well, it does a black screen rather a lot, really, and it’s getting a bit nerve wracking, but usually it starts showing stuff within a few seconds.  Not this time.  This time I got a full, right back to the boot sequence event, with some very worrying questions along the way.  Although it did seem to recover OK.
Since I’m going to be complaining about Win7 rather a lot (going on my initial experiences) I suppose I should note some things that I do like.

The main reason that Gloria has her own account and “Desktop,” rather than both of us just using the same one, is that I’m right handed, and she’s left handed.  So her account has the mouse buttons switched.  (And I always buy symmetric mice.)  An ongoing annoyance on XP is that, once it’s been on Gloria’s account, the mouse is left-handed until signed on to a right-handed account.  And vice-versa.  So it’s nice to know that, in Win7, someone at Microsoft has finally realized that, when you are switching users, there is need for context menus, and therefore both buttons can be active.  (It is annoying that they’ve added an extra screen you have to click through when switching …)

Also, it’s very cute that when a program is doing something that requires a progress bar, the toolbar button matches the “progress” with a green shading of its own.

Windows 7 is not compatible with anything before Vista.  (I refused to have Vista in the house, so I have no idea about whether Win7 and Vista are compatible.)  If your artsy friends are bugging you to get a Mac, or your geek friends are bugging you to get Linux, and you have been limping along with Windows XP, and are now desperately in need of a new computer (all of which applied to me), then go along with whichever set of friends will give you the most help, and switch.  It’ll be easier than trying to figure out how to make Windows 7 work the way you’ve been used to.

That’s an overstatement, of course, but not much of a one.

First off, you’ll have to throw out all your previous software.  I tend to stick with computers for too long, and with software for too long.  At least, that would be the position of software vendors.  I figure a) if it ain’t broke don’t fix it, and b) why should I have to spend a lot of time learning the mixed up new interface that some idiot down in marketing thought would be kewl, and try to find the functions that I need down where they have buried them.  (Often I find that the stuff I really need is completely gone.)

Think I’m kidding?

I use Firefox.  No particular problem there.  Except that Mozilla wanted me to install 5.0.1, after I’ve been used to 3.6.18 for a while.  And I only then realized that I had no idea how to move the bookmarks over to my new system.  I have no idea where Firefox puts them.  Now, under the previous versions of Firefox, it was pretty good about using any sets of settings you might have lying around, including old bookmarks files.  Now it’s gotten fussy.  Of course, now Firefox has a new Sync feature.  That’ll probably help in future, but it’s not much use right now. (Yes, I’m reading up on how to use it in the old version, and, yes, I’ll probably be able to get everything across.  Eventually.)  (And, besides, all of this is Mozilla’s fault, and I know you are eager for me to get on with the Microsoft bashing.)

So, Firefox works (wonder of wonders).  I use a mail program called Pegasus, which, with a little care and attention on installation, also works.

I also use Netscape 4.8.  (Actually Communicator 4.8, but …)  Yes, I know, old tech.  But, it is a very safe browser, especially with JavaScript turned off, and, as a malware researcher, I have occasion to look at some pretty dangerous places.  Also, it uses the old bookmark.htm file, which is really handy for managing and transfering my collection of bookmarks.  The installer will not run in Win7.

(Yes, I researched the problem, and, yes, somebody mentioned SeaMonkey.  Interface is very similar, I grant you, but I can’t find out where they keep the bookmarks.)

(Also, Windows 7 initially choked big time trying to run the installation.)

My wife likes the simplicity (and I like the safety) of Eudora.  Version 1.5.2.  Doesn’t run.

For both programs I have tried the “Troubleshoot compatibility” option.  I bought, and paid extra for, Windows 7 Pro specifically because it was “compatible” with WinXP.  I tried the “recommended” settings, which supposedly ran in-or-as WinXPSP2.  I tried the manual troubleshooting, telling it that the programs ran just fine under Win95/98/NT/2K/XP and/or 2003.  They didn’t run under any compatibility mode.

And, of course, don’t even bother to try and run any DOS or other command-line utilities.  (Even using “Run as administrator.”)

(Using utilities that mess with internals is one area where you don’t expect compatibility.  So I was surprised, and very pleased, to note that the Frhed hex editor works just fine under Win7, particularly after all the other problems I had.)

Some of these problems can be overcome, or worked around, using Windows Virtual PC XP Mode.  More on the trials of that, later

Ceterum censeo Microsoft esse delendam.

OK, I’ve thumped on Macs for a while now, so I guess it’s time to give Microsoft some bad words.

(I said a lot of bad words during this process …)

I bought the new computers back before Christmas, and it’s only now (well, last week, about seven months after I bought them) that I’m getting the new desktop set up.  Partly it’s been one darn thing after another, but partly it’s been a bit of anxiety.  And the anxiety was justified.

This will take a couple of postings to get through …

We’ve had means of expressing our opinions on various things for a long time.  Amazon has had reviews of the books pretty much since the beginning.  But how do we know that the reviews are real?  Virus writers took the opportunity presented by Amazon to trash my books when they were published.  (Even though they used different names, it only took a very simple form of forensic linguistics to figure out the identities.)

More recently, review spam has become more important, since many people are relying on the online reviews when buying items or booking services.  A number of “companies” have determined that it is more cost effective to have bots or other entities flood the review systems with fake positive reviews than it is to make quality products or services.  So, some nice people from Cornell university produced and tested some software to determine the fakes.

Note that, from these slides, there is not a lot of detail about exactly how they determine the fakes.  However, there is enough to indicate that sophisticated algorithms are less accurate than some fairly simple metrics.  When I teach about software forensics (aspects of which are similar to forensic lingusitics, or stylistic forensics), this seems counterintuitive and surprises a lot of students.  Generally they object that, if you know about the metircs, you should be able to avoid them.  In practice, this doesn’t seem to be the case.  Simple metrics do seem to be very effective in both forensic linguistics, and in software forensics.

A company called Autonomy, which has been selling image search technology, has launched an apparently freely available (open?) project called Aurasma.  At the moment only available on iPhone 4, this allows you to “augment” the reality (that the mobile device sees) by adding video to overlay it.

In this article, a BBC reporter/commentator opines that this is a cute trick, but only that.  I’m going to go out on a limb and predict that this assessment is short-sighted (albeit only if the technology expands to other platforms).  Given that YouTube users are uploading 48 hours of video to the site every minute of the day, I suspect that the ability to create video graffiti, and “tag” it to any vista, location, or object, will be irresistable.

Apparently the company thinks this will be a platform that companies will use to create ads, to promote their products or shops at related locations.  They probably will.  However, myriad users will be creating other content, for the same images, and we will have SEO (Search Engine Optimization) battles that will make the malware and phishing sites we see now pale in comparison.  The Tokyo Chamber of Commerce or tourism board may wish to overlay video over certain landscapes or landmarks, but how will they stand up against thousands of geeks who’ve all seen Godzilla?