Why is Apple showing Nelson Mandela on their home page?

I was thinking about looking at Apple products again. Money in hand I went to their website to look for ideas for things to get because I'm a sucker like the rest of society... then I saw this on their homepage. Yes that's Nelson Mandela.

Screenshot of the Apple homepage 12/13/2013

Now to say Nelson Mandela was a great leader of men is an understatement. A super strong figure in the world who stood up for people other than himself. He effected great change in millions while he was alive. He changed the way people think about other people, and he brought into the light a huge issue in his country... an issue he helped to fix. You can read more about his awesomeness in the link.

Apple on the other hand has been shown time and time again their short comings in terms of how they quite oppositely create great divides in people. Apple perpetuates classes, not only in the markets they sell to, but in the workforces that make Apple products. This next year Apple will have to prove that they aren't using slave labor.

So back to my original question, why is Apple showing Nelson Mandela on their home page?

Well for that, the answer is simple. He's an excellent graphic hook. That's pretty much it. Oh, and by showing him on their homepage it makes them appear to be not as bad. No links to anything talking about how great of a man he was that might distract from the almighty marketing machine that IS APPLE however.  Additionally, research shows that a smiling handsome man who reminds everyone of their elders and all that is good in the world makes people happy. It makes us warm inside. It makes people a little more likely to let lose of their tight grip on the money needed to buy a phone or some other device.

Well this holiday season while the people at the Apple store work for their low wages, and the people in China and other countries where they make the components that go into the Apple devices will not be with their loved ones, remember that marketing is everywhere. Marketing changes who we are. It changes what we do. It changes our perceptions of everything. Marketing is the art of fooling the masses. And just because a company like Apple shows Nelson Mandela on their homepage doesn't mean they've changed their ways. It just means they've found another way to fool people into not seeing them for what they are... a company focused on their bottom line.

I work in marketing and I think what they've done here is wrong. Apple has gone too far. Share this if you agree.

How to Protect your Google Accounts

I went into Google a few months back and viewed the plethora of information they have collected about me over time using information from domain names, social media accounts, browsers, email clients, and public record. It was alarming (but understandable). Use the internet for 20 years and you’ll have a backlog of info you’ve provided too. Two days ago I had to add yet another Google Analytics profile to my account. When I logged in, I saw the scrolling list of domains, and then it occurred to me that while I take precautions, many of my clients (who I also provide access to their sites via Google) might not take the same safety measures when it comes to protecting their Google accounts.

The method I use is called Two-Step verification. In short, to add another device (computers, phones, etc) I have an app [Google Authenticator] where I’ve already been authenticated. That app gives me a code that changes every 30-40 seconds, when I’m adding another system I simply open my phone, enter the code, then I’m verified. If I don’t have my phone on me, or someone else is trying to gain access to my accounts, then Google can prevent the access from that machine (if I’ve not yet used it).

Food for thought

One of my clients had to send out an email today along the lines of “Please ignore the last email to you from my email accounts, it was someone else.” That’s scary. While most other people might use Google Apps or G-mail, Google is striving more and more daily to make their accounts all seem fluid. So if you’re writing on Blogger, you’re using the same account you check your e-mail with. If you’re shopping with Google, then it’s the same account. If you’re posting messages on Google+, then its the same account… domain contacts, corporate email management, Google Analytics, and Webmasters access… not to mention anywhere you’ve logged in with your Google account as an OpenID. It’s sort of like making your Google account the holy grail of all things to hack. Google has the infrastructure to protect a lot of the attempts, but if you don’t take the time to enable the provided features (like two-step verification), you may find yourself the victim of more than identity theft.

What if a black hole isn't a hole?

So I had this idea earlier today after watching a couple of videos on Quantum Physics and Quantum Mechanics yesterday. The idea that there could be something with so much gravity as hypothesized in a black hole seems a bit confusing to me since nothing would be able to escape its gravity. What if, however a black hole isn’t really a hole at all? What else could it be?

Then I started thinking about liquid hydrogen. We know from videos taken inside of orbiting space craft that liquid matter returns to a spherical state in space. For instance water in a vacuum will create little spheres. When light hits a sphere of water or any other clear liquid the light is refracted in a different way than a solid. When we look at a black hole, couldn’t we really be looking at the refracted dark space on the other side of a sphere of liquid hydrogen or helium, or even water?

Image from NASA

This would explain the gas based stars that appear to be emanating from the black holes. It would also explain why there appears to be a lot of gravity at the center of the black hole. An object large enough to be visible from this far away in space would definitely generate a lot of gravity. If the sphere isn’t so far away though, it wouldn’t have stars revolving around it at all.

It seems a bit odd to me though that with all of the spheres, from small sub atomic particles  all the way up to gas giant stars, that within the vacuum of the universe we would naturally have an object that isn’t a sphere at all. Just a thought.

Image from Black Holes on Wikipedia.org

Hughes Satellite Internet

And why it’s not as modern as its marketing suggests.

I recently found myself in a situation where I needed a faster internet connection in a remote location (other than an ADSL line) and had to look at options. The DSL line is 1.5mb and is being used as a comparison to the satellite. I weighed the various different satellite internet subscription options, and after reading hundreds if not thousands of reviews decided on HughesNet’s Gen4 PowerMax plan.

Speed

First off, the speed when it’s available is quite fast (1gb in 16 minutes) compared to ADSL 3mbps lines. During daily summer thunder storms it’s not completely off, but it does have quite a degraded signal. The internet satellite providers such as Hughes limit the speed of their connection. These limits come in a couple of forms, one of which is the physical limitations set on the unit itself. Having a 10/100 ethernet port, this would be the expected limit. The connection marketing suggests that the limits are set to 15mb/s however in our tests we’ve noticed around 10mb/s the unit shuts itself off and then synchronizes after about 30 seconds. If the connection doesn’t approach the system speed limits, it appears stable for a time.

Allowances

I’m not entirely sure about their reasoning, but Hughes sets a limit on the amount of bandwidth with what they call “allowances.” These allowances are really the downfall of the system. The timeframes for the allowances are between 2am and 10am for businesses with 20gb available during normal business hours and 25gb after hours. Any real business is not going to wait for the late night download period once they’ve exhausted their bandwidth for the day. For personal accounts 2am and 8am are the bonus hours and 8am to 2am regular hours with limits of 20gb each. The units do not provide consistent connections during “bonus hours.” This suggests that the system infrastructure needs to be upgraded to handle all of the requests for downloads overnight… that or Hughes knows this and is causing this limit on purpose. Either way it’s bad. In contrast, most high-speed internet connections such as DSL, Cable, and Fiber have much higher limits on the amount of suggested bandwidth.

A limit of 40gb per month seems as though someone could download quite a bit of data. The internet has changed however, so modern users who download multi-gig software updates and service packs and use something like IMAP to access their e-mail accounts on multiple devices (iPads, iPhones, computer e-mail, etc), will find themselves running out of bandwidth rather quickly. Most electronics do not allow downloads to happen overnight. While some plugins exist to schedule downloads overnight for PCs, in our tests we’ve noticed the system becomes unstable overnight and never completes a download (or upload) over 500mb after 2am. If IMAP is downloading the same e-mail on multiple devices at once there is a significant hit. Additionally sending an e-mail is also a multiple hit because the bandwidth limits are imposed for the SMTP transmission of the message to the mail server, the copying of the sent message to the IMAP folder, and the downloading of the sent message onto other devices on the connection. Web mail seems to be a good solution for this if you a strong web mail client is installed on the mail server.

Additionally during our first month we realized that poorly programmed web pages that constantly refresh data with meta refreshes and AJAX consume the bandwidth at an astronomical rate. Internet videos such as YouTube and Lydia.com seem to download reasonably well by downloading a cache and then playing. Streaming connections such as VoIP and Video conferencing dos not work well at all and additionally obliterate the monthly allowance for the connection. VoIP communications are clear in-bound but sound like "someone talking through a fan" on the other end.

DNS, caching, and other smoke and mirrors tricks

In the remote location I’ve resorted to running a DNS caching server over the ADSL line because the initial 30 second delay between typing in a domain name and waiting for the HughesNet Gen4 system to return an answer was painfully slow. Also this connection’s caching server has to run over the ADSL in my situation because any requests to the Root Servers from the system are blocked by the satellite’s firewall unless you use the service's default DNS servers. Additionally things like SSH and PPTP protocols also appear to be filtered and blocked. Any attempts at SMTP over port 25 are also blocked, but SMTP over SSH or TLS work. The Gen4 uses its own caching system to deliver pages seemingly quickly, however these pages aren’t always up-to-date, so they may need to be reloaded (requiring twice the bandwidth because they still penalize for the serving of the cached page).

IP address changing

Having to connect with the unit to any website or connection where a whitelisted IP address is required is excruciating. Over the course of one attempt at communication with a remote server I received no less than 4 different IP addresses in different ranges from my unit. These 4 ranges appear to be the usual addresses for the connection and have not changed over the course of a month. Also by whitelisting the reverse look-up domain name I was able to save myself some trouble, however this opened up the servers where the whitelists exist to worse security for the duration of the connection.

Tech Support

HughesNet’s extremely polite telephone tech support staff are not familiar with the units at all. The person we spoke with on the phone was not familiar with what a satellite dish was, much less the setup. They were only reading from a script. In our situation someone accidentally moved the dish, which prompted a Saturday afternoon call to their support staff (in India). Upon the initial interchange it was made clear to the satellite support staff that the dish had been moved and that we simply needed the angles and settings for realigning the dish. The support staff after 45 minutes of trying to determine why they couldn’t access the device remotely suggested that we enter a hidden interface on the unit ourselves (192.168.0.1 click the little gray “i” in the header) to retrieve the information from the unit. After seeing this information I was able to use the tools on the transmitter itself for realigning the dish (with physical socket wrenches)… which took another 45 minutes. Connecting to the transmitter using a cell phone over wifi made the process of dish alignment much simpler.

Final Notes

Overall, my experiences with the satellite have been somewhat different from most of the users who have a satellite alone since I am able to rely on the DSL in the event the satellite is down. Since I quickly exhausted my monthly allowance, had I not had a DSL line at my disposal I would have been dead in the water. I would suggest HughesNet Gen4 only as a last resort when all other options (cellular included) have been exhausted. For the brave, the speeds are immense and there is some level of anonymity since it’s not directly tied to a physical location.

Apple's new iOS7 - Location Services Required

Apple’s new iOS 7 is bundled with so many features it’s not even funny. One of the features, (and I’m not laughing about this one),  is rather than using the NTP servers to get Network Time based on preferred TimeZone, the geniuses at Apple decided to tie this to Location Services. If you don’t enable location services because you’re using multiple networks at once (like Satellite and DSL) or because you’re using a proxy server around the world, Apple is kind enough to set your location to the Pacific TimeZone. So now if you’re in Eastern Time and use your new iOS 7 alarm clock without noticing the change in TimeZone, you can get 3 more hours of much needed (but unexpected) sleep. 

To fix this feature, you can either enable Location Services (bad idea), or you can go into:

Settings > General > Date and Time

I’m a little bit of conspiracy theorist because of the things I notice in my job. One of the things I’m not in favor of is when a company, in this case Apple, tries to force me to use their data collection engine to get what once were standard features. In their new “operating system” iOS 7, when I enable Location Services I’m allowing Apple to track my every move and I’m sharing that information back with them. They can tell what my habits are, where I’m going, where I’ve been, and at some point this will all be tied to advertising and marketing (if it’s not already being used to pick locations for their new Apple stores).  Additionally, I don’t want Apple knowing that we’re running 3 WiFi networks and how many machines (and what types) are on our networks.

From Apple's privacy policy:

Location-Based Services

To provide location-based services on Apple products, Apple and our partners and licensees may collect, use, and share precise location data, including the real-time geographic location of your Apple computer or device. This location data is collected anonymously in a form that does not personally identify you and is used by Apple and our partners and licensees to provide and improve location-based products and services. For example, we may share geographic location with application providers when you opt in to their location services.

Some location-based services offered by Apple, such as the “Find My iPhone” feature, require your personal information for the feature to work.

I see a problem with this legal distinction because the data is not collected anonymously. They know who I am and what I do. I have a single device that contains everything from email accounts to passwords for services to all of the locations I've been at where I was around either a wireless network or a cellular signal. It's only shared with their servers anonymously (or so we're told)... unless you opt into cloud services. 

We may also disclose information about you if we determine that disclosure is reasonably necessary to enforce our terms and conditions or protect our operations or users. Additionally, in the event of a reorganization, merger, or sale we may transfer any and all personal information we collect to the relevant third party.

It's all getting foggy

Another trend with all of the newer services is the integration with the “Cloud.” Cloud is another way of saying “we’re storing your information on a server on the internet… somewhere.” If you want all of your contacts, photos, text messages, and e-mails stored on some server that is THE server people want to get into to collect all of the information in the world, then store everything on the cloud. After all there is safety in numbers, right? 

I myself am not in favor of cloud services because I like to control my own data, and I like to control who has access to it. If I enable cloud services and rely on them, now not only can I be charged to get to my own data, but at some point when I need this data if I’m not willing to pay I can lose all of my data. Also in the fine print, sometimes when I share data with companies they can share my data with their partners or use it to offer me better services. I know this because my clients frequently ask “how can we get more information or feedback from our customers?” What happens when someone unexpected gets this data? #ios7

DSL not for VOIP

I recently (temporarily) switched from high-speed cable to DSL. The local cable companies do not service my present address. I've been using VOIP (Voice-over-IP) phones for the longest time without issue. I recently upgraded my phone system and on ADSL the voice quality is horrible.

I suspect the reason for this is that the local phone company doesn't want you to use VOIP because if you do, then you're not paying for their local phone service. Additionally, they're likely trying to filter any attempts at people streaming any content from their local networks. To combat this, by default in most of the DSL modems the phone companies, by default, have configured network communications to work with UBR (Unspecified bit rate), which means that the line variably bursts with a *potential* high-speed of your maximum internet speed.

For Voice-Over-IP communications the setting would need to be CBR (Constant bit rate) since you're streaming audio over the internet. So for anyone considering using Vonage or Magic Jack on a DSL system, you're probably better off paying your local monopoly to have a POTS (Plain Old Telephone System)... until of course they upgrade your circuit to fiber.

Massive fail in terms of User Experience and User Interface on Tivo Premiere 4.

As subscribers to Tivo's service we recently "upgraded" our 4 year old Tivo HD DVR to a Series 4 Premiere. Upgraded is their phrase not mine. Having done computer upgrades for years and even cross platform upgrades between Windows and Macs “upgrade" is not really the word you're looking for. More appropriately, buying a new Tivo and transferring existing service to it is a great way to waste a couple of days of your weekend.

A rough transfer to a Tivo Premiere:

1. If you have shows recorded on your old DVR and "upgrade,” you have to maintain service on the old DVR in order to access the shows on the old DVR over your local network.
2. If you attempt to maintain service for the month so you can transfer recordings to your new DVR expect to sign-up for a contract. Tivo will not allow you to extend service as a gesture of good will. In fact Tivo’s sales and support staff laugh when you mention to them that you would like to maintain both DVRs on the account for 6 hours.
3. My new Blu-Ray player has a USB port and I can watch movies on it. My Tivo Series 4 has a USB port and they've disabled any functionality outside of extending user input interfaces... meaning if you copy all of your old shows (in Tivo's proprietary format) to an external hard drive via Tivo Desktop on a computer, when you plug the drive into another unit you can not access those shows.
4. Their new user interface is abysmal... if they didn't provide you with the option to use the old interface you would likely throw your Tivo into an abyss.

When the new Tivo arrived I had already researched the massive failure on Tivo's part (I've been a long time user of Tivo so I've come to expect failure). I had a few major hurdles to overcome.

1. I had to transfer my cable card from my existing Tivo to the new Tivo. Since it's locked by the cable company to prevent theft or copying I had to contact them and walk through the painful transfer while I tried to explain what we were doing.
2. I unplugged my old Tivo from the ethernet connection so it would not call the mothership to find out it was no longer loved. I thought I had it fooled. When I removed the cable card the machine went into a panicked state and did everything short of mandating that I contact the Tivo service to reset the Tivo. Luckily I restarted the Tivo by unplugging it and the behavior went away. It of course was unable to watch live TV because of the lack of a cable card, but I could at least get to the main navigation again and watch the already recorded shows.
3. Since I had unplugged the old Tivo I was able to plug it into a local network (not connected to the internet) and access it with Tivo Desktop. I was after several hours of experimenting able to finally get the Tivo Desktop Service to successfully copy all of my recordings from the old Tivo.
4. After copying my old recordings from the old Tivo I figured I would show them on the New Tivo by streaming them over the local network. For about 20 seconds my workstation showed in the "Now Playing" list on the new Tivo. I could browse the list of videos from the old Tivo. When I selected a video the Tivo said "This video is no longer available." Then the server disappeared from the New Tivo's interface. I have not successfully connected the Tivo Series 4 Premiere to the Tivo Desktop Plus application since.
5. Online during my research I noticed on the Tivo website there was a feature to transfer the Wishlists and the Season Passes. This data is not “saved” on their website, it’s simply read from an activated unit. At the point a unit becomes deactivated, all data on the Tivo website is removed.

Since I’m a member of the Tivo Advisors committee, they never really give us a chance to indicate what we want from their service, they’re only interested in what type of car I want to buy, or what type of movie I might be going out to see. So here are my recommendations to make the user experience for Tivo customers much better.

1. When you offer users an “account” that they can use online to schedule their programs, keep a copy of this data. Since it pertains to your users, this account info should NOT disappear or be tied directly to a unit.
2. Users should be able to setup profiles. Most users expect that they can record things. If a family of three has three different people, they likely have 3 different interests. It’s in Tivo’s best interest to maintain information on these 3 interests so they can use the demographics for their marketing practices.
3. Stop locking your machines. It’s running a crippled version of Linux. Everyone knows this. Let people use the devices. You’re much more likely to have happy customers if they can actually use the machines they’re purchasing rather than having them set like bricks when a new Tivo comes out. No, I will not punish someone else I know and give them my old Tivo.
4. Learn about who your users are. If most of your users are using Apple products, then make your units work like Apple products do. Make it easy for them to download updates at their wish. Make it easy for them to connect to the machines on their local network to get stream their local content.
5. Stop putting ads in the main list. The whole reason I have a Tivo in the first place is so I can filter out ads. The last thing I want is MORE ADS.
6. The Tivo recommendations are bad. Take a hint from Netflix. Let people provide you with their likes, then you can suggest shows that way based on shows that other people like similarly. Don’t recommend something to someone because a company pays you to. This comes across as less helpful, and more advertising.