Un-shortening URLs

URL shortening services such as bit.ly are very popular, but sometimes they can be dangerous. This is why I am glad to see that a url un-shortening service http://www.websiteplanet.com/webtools/redirected/ is now available.

The way url shorteners work is that I can set up http://bit.ly/2Ffns9i as a short url for http://brianodonovan.ie and then you can save yourself some typing by typing http://bit.ly/2Ffns9i into your address bar and be brought directly to http://brianodonovan.ie . In this case the number of keystrokes is hardly worth the effort, but in many cases URLs can be very long and hence difficult to type in correctly.

The danger of short URLs is that you don't know where they are going to bring you to. For example you might be expecting to be brought to https://www.mybank.com/myaccount but instead find yourself brought to http://www.hackers.ru/defraud-me

The way http://www.websiteplanet.com/webtools/redirected/ works is that you go there and type in your short URL and it tells you where you will be redirected to if you use that short URL (this might involve multiple redirects). You can then decide whether or not you feel safe to visit the site in question.

The SPAM comments are back again :-(

I had a problem with SPAM comments some time ago. After trying a few defence mechanisms I finally settled on forcing people to log in. Recently I saw a revival of the SPAM comments. Of course this time I know the identity of the people leaving the stupid comments. I would threaten to leave junk comments upon their blogs - but this would not deter them (they might welcome the extra traffic).

 At the moment I am deleting the SPAM comments shortly after they are left, but if the problem doesn't go away I might be forced to introduce comment moderation.

 As they say It is an ill wind that blows no good. While I was deleting the SPAM comments I noticed that my home weather station has been off line since 14th of August. Hopefully I will be bringing it back on line again soon.

What it feels like to be a victim of Online crime

I normally like to view the internet as a fairly benign and safe place, but I have been a victim of cyber crime  three times in recent years. I don't think this will have a major impact upon my habits, but I suppose it is natural that it will make me a bit more cautious online.

Here are the details of the incidents:

eBay
I normally only use eBay to buy items, but a few years ago I was getting rid of some old gadgets and decided to see if I could sell them via eBay. Shortly after I placed the items for sale I got two emails enquiring about details of the laptop that I had for sale. This puzzled me since I wasn't selling any laptop. Shortly after this I got an email from eBay customer support saying that they were suspending my rights to sell on eBay due to suspicious activity on my account.

I still am not sure exactly what happened, but I think that someone was advertising laptops for sale on eBay such that the payments would go to the criminals and the irate customers would contact me when the laptops never arrived. I changed the password on my eBay account, and while I have never suffered any more fraud on eBay this is mainly because my bad first experience dissuaded me from ever selling anything on eBay again. In any case, if I did try to sell something, I am sure my seller reputation rating would be very low

Skype
Around the same time also suffered when somebody gained access to my Skype account. At the time I had set up a facility whereby my Skype credit would automatically get topped up whenever the balance fell too low. I would normally only need to top up my account every few months and so I was surprised to be notified that it was topped up twice in two days.

I investigated this and found that someone was making lots of calls from my account to phone numbers in the UK and Nigeria. Since none of these calls were to numbers I recognise or know, I assume they were fraudulent. I was keen to stop this and so I immediately changed the password on my account (it was already an obscure and hard to guess password)  and cancelled the instruction to automatically top-up so that my exposure would be limited to the current balance. This stopped the flow of calls being charged to my account.

I tried to make contact with Skype customer support to inform them what happened and have them investigate further. However, they showed no interest in making any enquiries. I am surprised at this because I would assume that the people involved ate still defrauding Skype customers. The amount of money I lost was not very significant, but I must admit that my opinion of Skype and their security controls was damaged by the way they reacted (or failed to react) to this incident.

Twitter
Earlier this month some malicious individuals gained access to my Twitter account. I am not sure exactly who gained access, but it seems that they used the access to send some strange Direct Messages with links to malware to my Twitter followers.

The first I knew about this was while I was out in a pub with a friend and I started getting messages from friends querying why I was sanding such strange Twitter messages. I decided to postpone investigating until I returned home, but when I got home I already had an email from Twitter customer support  saying that they noticed suspicious activity on my account and had disabled it. The email had a helpful link to instructions on how I could change my password and re-enable my account.

Overall the impact on me was relatively minor and I must say I was impressed with the speed and efficiency with which Twitter dealt with the issue.

Overall
I took a few lessons from these incidents:

• Malicious people will try to gain access to your online accounts even when there is no direct potential to steal money with this access (e.g. Twitter).
• Different online companies have a very different level of reaction to abuse of accounts on their system.
• When you are a victim of fraud, you can end up being seen by companies as of dubious honesty. This is just a sad fact of life.
• It is always important to stop malicious people gaining access to your account, but it is more important if their is a potential for this access to cost you money.

The demise of Google Reader and Google Listen

Like many other people I was surprised to hear about Google cancelling two of my favourite tools - the Google Reader service for managing your RSS feeds and the Google Listen podcast player.  Apparently the reason given is that they could not see any way to make revenue from these products, but I would have though that the users of Google Reader would have been a gold mine of data in relation to what feeds are most popular through the number of reads/favourites/shares etc..

I like the simplicity of Google Listen and you can still install Google Listen, but only if you have  saved a link to it (it no longer shows up in search results). I occasionally find that Listen will crash at random times and since Google have cancelled the project they are unlikely to fix it (I wonder why they didn’t Open Source the project like they did with Google Wave),  As a result I have switched to BeyondPod as a replacement. Overall I find it reasonably easy to use - I have paid for the Pro version, but I don't think I really use any of the Pro features so the free version is equally good from my point of view.

Apparently Google Reader site will be shutting down in July, so while there is no mad rush to get off the platform, it is still a good idea to find some other tool to replace it. The consensus on the internet seems to be that Feedly is the best alternative - my initial experiences seem to back up that claim.

Mysterious growth in visitor numbers from China

Readership statistics according to Blogspot

It is now 3 years since I started this blog and so I decided to review the visitor tracking statistics. I was pleasantly surprised to see that there was an apparent dramatic increase in the number of page views near the end of 2012.

This surprised me since I hadn't changed my blogging habits in any significant way. Therefore I decided to dig a little deeper. When I started the blog, I enabled Google Analytics tracking because the statistics provided by the Blogspot platform was much more limited. It turns out that the statics provided by each tracking platform were quite different and Google Analyitics doesn't see any  similar growth in visitors.

To understand why there might be a difference you need to understand that Google Analytics works by executing a snippet of JavaScript in the visitor's browser. Almost all browsers today support JavaScript soI would not expect many normal visits to fail to be registered. However, visits to the blog that come from automated programs won't register. It seems that there has recently been a huge leap in the number of visits to my blog that come from automated bots.

The other thing that has changed is the location that the visitors come from. When I looked at the location of my visitors from 2011 most of my visitors came from Ireland (which is not a surprise) and  I had no readers at all from China (I assume that this was because the great firewall of China was blocking access to the Blogger platform). However, I got my first visitor from China in 2012 and they now represent the a very significant proportion of the visitors (according to Blogger statistics, but not according to Google Analytics)

There is definitely something dodgy going on, because I don't think that I am suddenly popular in China. Perhaps this article from the BBC gives some clue.

WiFi Ruler - an essential Android App

One of the good thinks about living in a well developed country is that you can get mobile internet access most places. What is even better is the fact that, you will nearly always be able to find a café or similar establishment which is willing to offer free Wifi internet access. However,  one thing that really annoys me is that many of these free access points will require you to click on a button to say that you accept their terms and conditions of use. I understand that mostly they have been advised to do this by overly cautious lawyers, but it is really quite ridiculous because nobody ever reads those terms and conditions anyway and if you were tempted to engage in illegal activity you would hardly be put off by the need to click on a button.

The reason why this feature is annoying is because many people would like to set up their phone to automatically connect to certain WiFi access points when encountered. This saves you the bother of explicitly configuring your phone to connect to the WiFi service every time that you enter the café. However, if the café has a "clickwall" connecting to the WiFi is not enough to give you internet access unless you explicitly launch your phone's browser and click on the button. What is even more frustrating is that your phone will probably disconnect from your mobile provider's 3G service on the assumption that you don't need this when you are connected via WiFi.

Luckily I recently found out that there is an Android app called WifiRuler, which can solve this problem. It allows you to set up rules for what to do immediately after you connect to a particular WiFi service e.g. click on the accept point or enter your username/password. This application will stay running in the background and automatically accept the terms & conditions on your behalf. There is even a blog where you can get new versions.

There is a paid and free version of the application, but to be honest I am not sure what the difference is.

I'moving to Zurich

One of the wonderful features of the internet is that it should not matter where in the world you are located. The protocols of the internet were designed to treat all traffic fairly so once you have a connection to the internet you should be able to get at any internet resource.

However, there are a number of industries (primarily music and movies) who continue to try an pretend that the internet is not a global phenomenon and continue to try and limit availability of their products and services to particular geographies. As I wrote before, these services are doomed to obsolescence - partly because such a business model is seen by consumers as unfair, but also because it is a technically difficult task to restrict your internet service to a particular country or set of countries.

There is an advertising series running on Irish Radio stations at the moment with the punch line "That's it, I'm moving to Zurich". The "joke" is that the speaker is actually planning to change pension providers to Zurich Life rather than actually emigrate to Switzerland. However, it seems that the administrators of our work network are planning a similar move.

It used to be the case that we could not access any Irish related web sites from work because most internet geo-location serviced (such as Where is my IP) seemed to be of the opinion that we were based near Portsmouth in the South of England (presumably since we used an internet service provider who was based near there). My colleagues didn't mind too much because it also meant that we got a chance to try out services which were supposedly only available in the UK. However, a recent change in our network configuration means that most internet servers now thing that I am based in Switzerland (not too far from Zurich).

I wonder are there any interesting TV shows running in Switzerland that I should try to catch up on?

Is Google AdSense a lucrative way to earn money?

Many bloggers believe that including Google AdSense advertisement on your site represents an opportunity to earn some significant money that will defray your costs and even provide you with an additional source of income. When I established this blog, I deliberately decided not to include any advertisements because I wanted to make it clear that I was not motivated by potential earnings.

When I registered for Movember I decided to temporarily enable Google AdSense ads for the month. I was partly hoping that this would provide me another way to collect money for the charity, but I was also experimenting to see how much money could be earned from this stream.

The bad news for the Irish Cancer Society is that this did not result in a significant revenue stream. In total I earned 7 euro and 64 cents during the month. Since they don't allow you to withdraw any money until your account earnings exceeds 10 euro, there was very little chance that I would consider giving up my day job and living off my AdSense earnings (in order to ensure that the charity didn't suffer I made a personal donation in lieu).


This experience, matches the experience I had a few years ago with trying AdSense advertisements on the web site of a local soccer team. The earnings from google were negligible, while the club had no problem convincing local businesses to pay several hundred euro per year to have their logo appearing on the web site. Of course, it could be the case that the local businesses are paying above the market rates for the existing advertisements - in fact many of them may be consciously doing this in order to build up good will in the community or to support what they believe is a good cause.

What should be free and what should I expect to pay for

One of the strange things about internet culture is the fact that people expect to pay for leisure materials such as music, movies and games - but they are very reluctant to pay for tools that they use to run their business.

The entertainment industry has been very vigilant in trying to ensure that people continue to expect to pay for their music. In Ireland the recording industry association managed to persuade artists to stop allowing their music be used on the free CDs distributed with Sunday newspapers. Although the newspapers were paying royalties, the association feared that the fact that the consumer was not explicitly paying for the music would create an expectation that music should be free.

In fact they were so successful in pushing the idea that music must be paid for, that many people are reluctant to download music from sites like the Free Music Archive because they fear that there must be  something dodgy about a site that allows free music downloads. Until recently there was a Russian company which undercut iTunes by offering tracks for 39 cents each rather than 99 cents - consumers who would never dream of pirating music were reassured by the fact that they had paid for the tracks, but it seems that the company was not passing on any royalties and simply pocketed all the money.

The market for office productivity tools is significantly different. You might expect that people would be willing to pay for these since they are typically used only in a business context, but the fact that some of the leading suites of productivity tools like Libre Office are available for free download leads consumers to expect that they don't need to pay for such products. I don't normally feel sorry for Microsoft, but it is very unlucky for them that not only do they loose market share to open source competitors, but the fact that these are available free of charge apparently makes people feel less guilty about pirating copies of Microsoft Office.

Irish Revenue Online Service is an example of the wrong way to implement an online service

Most citizen's don't particularly enjoy paying taxes, because nobody  like parting with their hard earned money. Therefore, the tax authorities should try to make the process of filing a tax return as painless as possible. In fairness the Irish tax authorities have done a good job  of making the paper forms and associated documentation quite easy for the lay person to understand, so when I recently started using  the revenue on-line service  I was expecting that it would be equally simple to use. Unfortunately I was very disappointed and found it very frustrating.


This service was originally developed to be used by tax professionals who spend most of their working life dealing with tax issues and is it is optimised for this type of user. It was only in recent years that they opened the system to "normal taxpayers" and they have been surprised that the system has not proved more popular. However, from my experience (which I will describe below) I can totally understand why people are sticking with the much more user friendly paper based system. I understand why the tax authorities would prefer people to use the on-line system, but they will have to adapt the system significantly if they hope that a large section of the population will be willing  to switch.

The first hurdle that users must battle with is the registration process. They need to be careful to avoid fraudulent registrations, but the system they devised is almost guaranteed to take about over a week to complete and hence relatively few normal taxpayers will have enough patience to do it properly.

1. When you initially register on their web site you will in a normal enough looking web site registration form. However, when you complete this form you are not really registered you have simply applied for a ROS Access Number (RAN) which is required to progress to the next stage. For security reasons this RAN is printed on a physical piece of paper and then posted to your home address. This is done to ensure that the person applying for access to your tax records is really you (or at least has access to post delivered to your home).
2. However, the need to print and post the document ensures that there is a delay of several days before you can move to the next steps which is to apply for your Digital Certificate. When you apply for the certificate, they don't issue it to you straight away, but instead they generate an access password which must be printed out and posted to you. This second postal interaction doesn't really increase security, because anyone who can intercept the first letter will probably be equally able to intercept the second. 
3. In any case, you must wait until your password arrives in the post before you can retrieve your Digital Certificate and begin using the system.

Although this system seems quite straight forward, the delay involved effectively stopped me from using the system the first two years I tried. Like many citizens, I normally only need to interact with the tax system once per year when filing a tax return. As soon as I have collected all of the necessary information to complete a return, I like to complete the return straight away so that I can then relax and forget about the tax system for the next year.

The first year I decided to try filing my tax return on-line I was full of enthusiasm. When I had all of my documents ready to file a tax return, I was disappointed, but not surprised that I had to wait for the first postal step. However, when the letter arrived with the revenue access number I was frustrated that I could not complete the form straight away and so I completed the return on paper before the second letter arrived.

The next time I thought about the ROS system was when it was time to file a return for the following year. I found the old letter in my file with the access code to retrieve my certificate. Unfortunately when I tried using it I was told that the password had expired. Therefore I went back to using the paper system for another year.

The third year I decided that I should be a little more patient and so I completed the registration system from scratch. This time I encountered technical issues when I went to retrieve my password. The system gave me the unhelpful message "Something has gone wrong. Please contact the ROS HelpDesk". In fairness, the people operating the help desk were very responsive and did their best to help. However, it was hard for them to diagnose the cause of the problem from this generic message.

1. Their first suggestion was that the browser I was using might not be a supported one. They supplied me with a list of supported browser versions. I tried three of the browsers on their list but all of them gave me the exact same error message.
2. The next guess from the help desk people was that it might be an issue caused by the operating system I was using. They suggested that I try again on a Windows system. Since I would never destroy a good PC, by installing Windows on it, I was forced to create a Windows virtual machine image that I could use exclusively for accessing the ROS system,
3. Unfortunately when I tried accessing the system from the windows system it was still telling me "something has gone wrong". When I told this to the help desk, their next suggestion was to try updating the version of Java installed on the machine. Luckily this suggestion worked and after a delay of 3 weeks I was finally able to use the ROS system.

Since I am using a virtual machine to access the tax system, I should be able to keep a backup of my exact environment and use this to access the site next year. However, many users will be constantly updating their environment and it is likely that they will encounter fresh issues each year.


I think that there are a few simple changes that could be implemented to make the ROS system easier to use for non-professionals:

• If they abandoned the use of private digital certificates it would simplify the registration process and also allow them to be much more fussy about the details of the software used to access them. Most banks think that normal SSL encryption is secure enough for their web interfaces, so surely the revenue site should go along with this concensus.
• It would be helpful if the web site gave more helpful error messages. As a software developer I appreciate that it can be difficult to generate meaningful error messages, but surely they could do better than the simple "something has gone wrong". 
• It would also make life easier if they added an option to summarise the user's environment and email it to the help desk people so that they could see all of the relevant details at one glance. The  help desk people were simply guessing in the dark about what might be the cause of my problem, because there was no better way for them to diagnose the problem.

In summary the process the system seems to be quite fussy about the computer environment users have when trying to access the site. Tax professionals who spend quite a bit of time accessing the ROS site will probably be willing to install specific versions of software to enable them to access the site. However, the majority of citizens who only want to access the site once per year will be much less willing and hence will probably stick with the paper system unless it is made easier.

Scanning the wireless activity in my neighbourhood

In a previous post I reported that when I did a survey of wireless access points near where I live about 2.5 years ago, I found that 7% of wireless access points were unencrypted. Recently I needed to check what wifi signals were active in my house in order to diagnose some signal interference problems and while I was at it I decided to do a quick check to see if the wireless landscape of my neighbourhood had changed significantly in the last few years.

This time, I did my survey using the wigle.net application on Android (2.5 years ago I was using a Symbian based Nokia phone - which is itself and indication of how things have changed in the meantime). I didn't walk quite as far this time, so the survey was less complete, but I was dissapointed to find that the percentage of unencrypted wireless access points in the most recent survey dropped down to 2.7% of the total. I looked at the data to see what had happened to the open wifi points and they were broken down into 3 roughly equal groups:

• The access point was still active and open
• The access point was still active, but was now secured with some form of encryption
• The access point was no longer active

I am not sure why people are becoming less willing to leave their wifi access point unencrypted, but from chatting to friends I think that people are not really concerned by the impact that casual users might have upon their own internet browsing. In fact they are more concerned about the fact that they could get into trouble if a passer-by used their wireless access point to engage in some illegal activity on the internet.

In the previous survey, well over half of the access points had a SSID of the form eircom_XXXX which is probably a clue that they got their wireless access point from eircom and never bothered to change the default SSID. Since eircom was originally the monopoly supplier in Ireland this showed me how many people like to stick with the default choice.

However, in the more recent survey I noticed that SSIDs of the form UPCXXXXX seemed to becoming more popular which probably indicates that many people are opting to switch to the cable modem service from UPC - although it also indicates that many still don't bother changing the default settings on their router. The following chart shows that based upon my totally unscientific survey UPC seem to have overtaken Eircom in my local market. Most of the people in the "other" category will have changed their SSID from it's default, so I can't guess what internet provider they might be using.

Is the unrestricted distribution of music on the internet really a threat to the music industry?

The recent controversy about the Stop Online Piracy Act (SOPA) in the United States and its close equivalent in Ireland has largely been represented in the media as a battle between the rights of music consumers (who want to be free to do anything they want to) and the music industry (who want to be able to exert as much control over online activity so that they can protect their livelihood). While there is some accuracy in this portrayal, the reality is much more subtle.

The people working in the music industry can broadly be divided into two groups:

1. The musicians who are involved in composing and/or performing music.
2. People who are involved in facilitating the distribution of music e.g. people working for record companies or working in a music venue.

I think that the later group of people might have a reason to fear that the unrestricted distribution of music might threaten their jobs, because the internet makes music distribution so easy that they are not needed as much as before. However, I don't think that the musicians have anything to fear. On the contrary, modern technology means that the current generation of youngsters find that it is easier than ever before to create music and to distribute it to music lovers all over the world. Similarly, people are listening to more music than ever on their various different devices. Hence I think that the future of the music industry is very secure.

In recent years the number of professional recordings made by formal record labels has been actually  increasing. The number of home made recordings is increasing at an even more dramatic rate, because the cost of the equipment required is dropping and the equipment is becoming easier for non-experts to use. Of course, the record industry is not happy with their reduced profits because they are selling fewer copies of each recording. However, there is very little sign that the music industry is in decline and consumers have no reason to fear that the range of music available will decline.

Upgrading my home internet connection speed

As I reported before, the download speed of the connection between my house and the ISP is typically not the factor that the determines the overall responsiveness on most web sites. However, I recently decided to sign up with one of the broadband/TV/phone packages with UPC and I was tempted to upgrade my internet connection speed from 25Mbs to 50Mbs at the same time because the cost difference was minimal (€5 per month). I must compliment the UPC staff for how helpful they were in making the upgrade process as simple as possible.

The first thing I did after installing the new router was to test the connection speed using the SpeedTest.net service. The download speed when connecting from my desktop computer (which was connected to the router by an ethernet cable with a nominal speed of 100 Mbs) was a very impressive  47.5Mbs

Next I tried running the test from a laptop which was connected by wifi link with a nominal speed of 56 Mbs (I was sitting right beside the router so the signal would have been very strong). Unfortunately, I  could only achieve ~20 Mbs download speed. Since I was using the same test service and the same ISP link, it is clear that it was the link bertween the laptop and the WiFi router that was causing the bottlekneck.

I tried connecting via Android phone I could only achieve a download speed of about 10Mbs, but when I disabled encryption on my WiFi router the speed of the connection from my phone increased to 20 Mbs (the same as the laptop connection). Clearly the CPU load on my phone to encrypt the packets was limiting the transfer speed. As a result I decided to disable encryption on my router in common with my policy of allowing casual sharing of my network link with anyone nearby.

I was quite pleased to see that the upload speed had increased from the 1 Mbs I was getting with the 25Mbs package to 4.6-4.7 Mbs with the 50 Mbs. The upload speed did not seem to vary much from measurement to measurement which incicates that the connection between my house and the ISP was indeed the limiting factor in the overall performance. I think that this increase in upload speed alone will justify the extra €5 per month that they charge for the faster service.

Regional restrictions on media license are fundamentally unfair and hence doomed to become obselete

The recent launch of the netflix service in the UK and Ireland was initially greeted with great enthusiasm, but this enthusiasm quickly turned to disappointment when people realized that the aomount of movies and TV shows available on this service was going to be much reduced compared to what was on offer in the USA (for essentially the same monthly price). This brings into focus the fundamental unfairness of regional restrictions on media rights.
 

In the pre-digital world, the owners of the copyright on work with a global appeal were forced to work with local partners in each grography to help get their content distributed. Typically they negotiated different licnese terms for each region based upon the market reality. This tradition has become entrenched in the media indistry and some players are trying to implement a similar scheme on the internet, but it is doomed to failure for three reasons:

1. It is technically hard to enforce regional restrictions on the internet, because the architecture of the internet was designed to make the user's geographic location invisible. Most sites that implement geographic restrictions do so by accessing databases that map IP addresses to geographic locations, but these are not notoriously inaccurate. For example, when I access the internet from work, most sites seem to think that I am in the UK since we get internet connectivity from a UK based ISP. This means that sites like RTÉ Player provide only a restricted service since they claim I am not in Ireland.
2. In the pre-digital era, movies were promoted on TV stations and in newspapers and other outlets that only had a regional reach. Therefore they would not tend to be very aware of what entertainment offerings were available in other countries. However, now people typically learn about new media offerings on the internet which has a global reach and when they read about wonderful new services they tend to get frustrated when they can't access them.
3. The majority of people see regional restrictions on media usage as fundamentally unfair. While their conscience might trouble them if they were sharing pirated track via BitTorrent,so they have no moral objection to using any of the freely available tools that make them appear to be located in a different country than they are.

The first generation of  digital distribution for movies was on DVDs. The movie industry tried to continue implementing a different distribution model for different regions by implementing a system of DVD region locking this system was widely circumvented because people believed that it was morally unfair that someone should try to stop them playing DVD movies at home that they had legitimately bought while on holiday in another country. This system gradually lost it effectiveness because consumers rebelled against it and began to buy region-free DVD players, I think the same thing will happen to the regional restrictions on streaming media services and the sooner the industry wakes up to this fact the better.

A lazy person's guide to staying active on several social networks at once

I am a keen adopter of new technologies and as a result I sign up for account on most new social networking related sites. People sometimes as me how I manage to find the time to keep all of these accounts active. However, the truth is I can't keep active on all of these different sites, but with clever management of the feeds between the different services it is possible to give the appearance of being active on all of them without actually logging into most of the sites in question regularly.

For, example the following diagram outlines some of the automated information flows that I have set up between the various social networks on which I am active:

• While Facebook is most popular among young students, LinkedIn is a social network more popular with older professionals. There is a large overlap between the people registered on both sites, but if you want to maintain links with all of your friends, you really need an account on both services. Since people seem to spend more time keeping their status updated on Facebook or Twitter than LinkedIn, LinkedIn has a feature that you can enable to automatically import status updates from the other platforms. This has the benefit of making it seem like you are paying more attention to your LinkedIn profile than you really are, but you need to be careful because the social norms on LinkedIn are radically different from Facebook and what is seen as a really cool status update on Facebook, might seem highly inappropriate on LinkedIn.
• I use Foursquare for sharing with my friends details of where in the world I happen to be located at any one time. I like Foursquare because it is most fun to use, but since only a sub-set of my friends are active users of Foursquare I have configured it to automatically share my activity on Facebook and Twitter. Although some of the non-users of FourSquare are puzzled to read the announcements that I have become mayor of some arbitrary place, I get more comments and feedback through these other platforms than I get on FourSquare itself.
• I track my exercise using the MyTracks application on my Android phone. This is a really handy application which uses the GPS in my phone to keep track of how fast and far I have been running or cycling. The data collected by this application is truly amazing, but it is not really a very social application. So when I want to share my training data with friends I like to use the DailyMile site. This site can automatically share information with both Facebook and Twitter. Luckily a colleague from IBM has developed a really handy Android application called Tracks2Miles which automatically transfers data from MyTracks on to DailyMile (which in turn shares it on Facebook and Twitter - which in turn feeds LinkedIn).
• Bit.ly is a popular URL shortening service. If you create an account on this service and associate your Twitter and Facebook credentials with your bit.ly account, then you can automatically share a status update to both services at the same time as shortening a long URL.
• If you wish to interact with social networks inside IBM, security restrictions mean that web based tools can't help. However, BlueTwit sidebar is a Firefox extension that is available inside IBM. It is useful because it allows you to conveniently read and write status updates from several different social networks both inside and outside the IBM firewall from a single UI..It is available as a sidebar whenever you have Firefox open (which is most of the day for a lot of people).
• In a similar vein, WildFire is an open source extension available for Lotus Notes that allows me to read and write social network updates to a large number of different social networks from a single UI. It is really handy for anyone who has the Lotus Notes client running all day long (most IBM employees fall into his category).

While these automated tools are really handy and save me a lot of effort, they do have one significant drawback. Although they give the impression that I am active on several sites, and alert human can easily detect the fact that I am not really engaged. For example, there is no way for an automated tool to read what someone else has written and leave them a thoughtful reply. Most social software experts advise that you should spend at least twice as much time reading as you do writing (in real-life nobody likes people who turn up at a party and talk incessantly without listening - this is what these tools make you look like online). In fact some people feel so strongly against automated tools like the ones I described here that they refer to them as "anti-social software"

This problem can be partially overcome by setting up email notifications (most social network platforms can be set up to periodically email you a summary of recent activity that might be of interest so that you can respond to some).

A service that I don't use much any more is ping.fm - but if you really want to automate your status updates this is the tool for you. It is capable of connecting a huge variety of social networking sites and it is even extensible so that if support for your favourite network is not yet enabled, you can add it yourself. A really neat feature of this platform is what they call vocabulary expansion, this allows you to put special tags into your status updates and have the system intelligently replace these tags with something different when propagating your status update each of the target platforms. However, this feature never really caught on since most social networkers are more interested in vocabulary contractions than expansion.

Is working from home a good idea?

One of the benefits of modern network technology is supposed to be the fact that "location doesn't matter" and "you can work from anywhere". While it is true that remote working is now very feasible for many occupations, I think that where you choose to do your work has a very significant effect upon your productivity.

I was recently at a conference and I noticed that during the lunch break many delegates chose to use the free time to catch up on the work they were missing by reading emails, checking voicemail, returning calls etc.. They were all a long way from their normal place of work so it is good that they could get some work done. However, they did not simply choose any location in which to do their work, instead there was a frantic search for suitable locations i.e. a quiet alcove where they had some peace and quiet as well as a place to sit and maybe even a place to rest their laptop.

What this means is that where you are located on a global scale doesn't matter. For example, you can easily do most jobs from New York City, but it would not be a good idea to base yourself in the middle of Times Square if your job requires some peace and quiet. Likewise you could probably do most jobs from a location in a remote wilderness location in African so long as you had power and in Internet connection, but you would probably need to move to a shady location ensure there was not too much glare on the screen.

IBM is quite liberal in terms of allowing employees to work from home if they want. In general the consensus seems to be that senior people can work productively even when remote from their colleagues, but junior employees benefit significantly from working in a team where they can learn from more experienced engineers. In some IBM labs in the USA, there are so many people working from home that people are beginning to complain that there is little point in being in the office since there is nobody else there to interact with, and the company has launched a "back to the lab" initiative to counteract the problem (which I guess is similar to the problem of city centres becoming empty shells when all businesses move to malls in the suburbs).

The factors influencing your decision about whether to work from home or not would include:

• How far your home is from your normal workplace? I am luck enough to need only 20 minutes to cycle to work each morning, but many people live over 100km from work so they naturally don't want to make that journey if they can avoid it.
• What is your home environment like? Some people are lucky enough to have a well furnished office space at home, but others might live in cramped accommodation shared with other people and hence working from home might not be feasible for them.

I am the only person from the team I am currently working with who is based in Ireland, so all of our team meetings are virtual meetings. However, I still find it useful to go into the office most days, becuase I know if I spent too long at home I would begin to suffer from severe cabin fever. It is great that companies allow people to work from home, but this does not mean that everyone could/should work from home on a regular basis.

Am I really a human?

Lots of web sites implement a CAPTCHA system to stop access to their site from automated programs. Normally this involves showing a distorted picture of a few letters and asking the user to read them and type them into a text box to verify that they are a real human. The general idea is that reading such a distorted picture should be an easy task for a human, but it is a surprisingly difficult task for automated image recognition programs.

When CAPTCHAs were first introduced the distortion in the picture was relatively minor and so it was not a major inconvenience for user to type in the letters. However, it should not have been a major surprise that the bad guys invested in improved software for reading distorted letters and the CAPTCHA developers were then forced to implement even greater distortion of their sample letters to trick the automated software. As a result I now find that the letters in most CAPTCHAs are extremely difficult for me to read.

Maybe it is simply the fact that my sight is failing because I am getting older, but the last few times I have failed to complete it at the first attempt. I normally require at least 2 or 3 attempts before I manage to get the letters right which probably makes the site suspect I am not a real human. Do other people find the same problem with completing CAPTCHAs?

My Electricity usage is now available on-line

My Current Cost bridge device arrived in the post so my electricity usage statistics are now being posted and stored on-line. The Current Cost Dashboard site allows me to draw many nice graphs to help me understand trends etc. Although my weather data is publicly visible, I decided that I ought not share my live electricity usage so freely because someone pointed out to me the electric usage data could identify whether or not someone is home which in turn could be helpful to burglars.

I will probably share some data on my historic usage, but unfortunately I can't do that yet because I don't have enough data uploaded yet to make the graphs interesting.

How to avoid being ripped off by exorbitant mobile data roaming charges

I (like many other people) have become very reliant upon my Smartphone. Luckily the market is quite competitive both for phones and for service providers so that in general you can get very good value when either buying a new phone or when subscribing to a mobile data service to allow you get the most out of it.

One big exception to this is when you leave your home country. The roaming data rates charged by most operators when you bring your Smartphone abroad are nothing short of outrageous. For example, my provider charges €10 per MByte for data access when I am outside of Ireland so naturally I turn of 3G on my phone and try to survive without connectivity when I am travelling.

In recent years the European Union has done a great service to the public by putting pressure on the  carriers to reduce their roaming charges for phone calls within the EU. They have recently turned their attention to also reducing data roaming charges, but this initiative is likely to take some time to bear fruit.

I recently came across and the TEP Wireless service which seems like a really cool idea whereby you can rent a pocket wifi from them for the country that you are travelling to. Then you can configure your Smartphone to use this wifi service and you are able to use your Smartphone abroad as much as you want without having to worry about running up large bills. The rates seem quite reasonable, presumably because they buy the devices and sign up for contracts in the country you are visiting so they are paying local rates rather than visitor rates.

I can't wait to try out this service (it was only launched a few weeks ago). Unfortunately they don't offer service in South Africa yet, so I won't be able to use it on my upcoming vacation, but I definitely will try it out soon.

Is the era of Windows dominance coming to an end?

Whenever possible I like to use Linux software on all of my PCs. Many of my colleagues also have a similar preference and so I would consider it quite normal for people to choose Linux as a desktop operating system in preference to Windows. However, I do realise that my world view might be slightly skewed and Windows might still be the overwhelming favourite operating system in the real world.

I wrote before , that Google Analytics tells me that roughly a quarter of the readers of my blog are using Linux, but this is a small and unrepresentative sample. I recently received a newsletter from the Google Analytics team where they analyse data from hundreds of thousands of sites (including mine) which have enabled anonymous data sharing.

The following table summarises their statistics about the relative popularity of various operating systems at the start of this year as compared with the year before. I assume it is probably typical of the Internet as a whole.

% Visits from OS	Nov/09 - Feb/10	Nov/10 - Feb/11	Difference
Windows	89.9%	84.8%	-5.1%
Macintosh	4.5%	5.2%	+0.7%
Linux	0.6%	0.7%	+0.1%
Other	5%	9.3%	+4.3%

You can see that the percentage of people using Windows is indeed going down (even if it is still the lions share of the market at about 85%). What is interesting is that most people are not moving to Linux or Macintosh, but are moving to "Other". I suspect that this is mainly a reflection in the increasing number of people using various mobile devices to access the Internet.

I think that this is great news, because variety is very important for the health of the Internet.