Katherine Bell of the Harvard Business Review seems amused by Apple’s naming choice for its new tablet computer. The iPad has become the target of jokes worldwide in the 24 hours since Steve Jobs unveiled the product yesterday. See her article titled The Day Apple Turned the Web into Junior High for some more discussion.

The iPod name was ridiculed when Jobs introduced the first model in 2001, but consumers got past the name and looked at the offering’s value. Here’s a video of the product introduction.

On January 20, 2010 in the WSJ, Kara Swisher predicted that the tablet would be called the iPad. She noted that the name is easier to market than some of the alternatives. See her article called BoomTown Psychic Prediction: “iPad” Will Be Name of New Apple Tablet (Take a Poll to Make Your Guess!)

There were intellectual property issues that influenced the naming process, too. Several outlets including TUAW have noted that Fujitsu has claimed the iPad name in the USA. See Rumor: Apple gunning for iPad trademark for more details.

Outside the English-speaking markets, the iPad name should not cause much of a fuss.

Updated 1718 HT: TUAW has posted an article called Arthur C. Clarke’s 2001 Newspad finally arrives, nine years late comparing the iPad to a tablet computer that astronauts used in 2001: A Space Odyssey.

The Newspad has been my long-time benchmark for a tablet computer, even though it was only a movie prop. Looks like I will finally have a Newspad this year.

It’s inevitable that job seekers and graduating students will use more sophisticated methods in their job search. Case in point: the video resume.

I see more and more undergraduates who edit their own videos - it’s as easy and natural for them do so as writing a paper.

I assume that some people got the idea of a video resume from Elle Woods in the movie Legally Blonde. In 2001, this was good for a laugh. In 2010, thanks to YouTube, blogging and Flash, the video resume may become an essential job search tool.

A quick Google search on “video resume” produced over 123,000 results.

Brian Krueger’s brief piece on video resume etiquette has some basic, common sense tips that are helpful.

Click here to view the embedded video.

A 26 March 2008 article article from Education Portal called Job Resumes 2.0: Creating a Video Resume has many more tips.

Finally, About.com has its own page on video resume tips, including production.

I’ve been using TurnItIn.com in my graduate courses for several years, mostly because I like the service’s features. I can mark papers online, without having to use Microsoft Word or a PDF tool.

But TurnItIn.com started as a set of paper-checking features that I do use. I encourage my students to submit their papers early and check their own originality reports, as the reports can be very helpful.

USA Today ran an interesting article on 19 November 2009 called Case of the purloined term paper; when work is resold. Melinda Rieboldt found out about student plagiarism the hard way, when her children were searching Google and discovered a group paper she had helped write in a University of Phoenix MBA course. Melinda says that no one in her 5-member student group knows how that paper was posted online.

Paper mills, custom essay companies and other online sources may help students finish their assignments faster. The USA Today article quotes Notre Dame professor Susan Blum, who expresses a common belief among educators: the process of completing an assignment is a valuable and important part of education.

Image courtesy of nenyaki on flickr via a Careative Commons license.

I rarely use my billso.com pages to recommend specific software packages, but today I’m making an exception for LapLink’s PCMover Upgrade Assistant. At the current price of $20 or €16, it’s a steal. My upgrade process took 4 hours – and this was the easiest Windows upgrade I’ve done in 20 years.

I found PCMover when I was upgrading my wife’s Windows Vista laptop to Windows 7. Microsoft’s Windows 7 installer will do an in-place upgrade that tries to migrate the current files and applications - but from what I had read, a clean install would be a better option.

However, a clean install might force me to reinstall the old applications and migrate the data myself. I didn’t want to reinstall each app one at a time.

For users who are trying to upgrade their 32-bit Windows installation to a 64-bit installation, the clean install option is Microsoft’s only official upgrade path. Reinstallation of the applications is more or less required.

PCMover simulates a clean install by analyzing the drive’s files and creating an archive called a moving van. Applications that won’t migrate properly are flagged, and the user can choose what apps and data will actually be moved.

This process took less than an hour, and the archive was created on the current hard drive. Obviously, this migration software won’t work unless the target partition has a lot of free space available. Fortunately, this was a 500GB drive.

At this point, it was time to do a clean install of Windows 7. I just followed the PDF instructions that LapLink provided. The installation took about 30 minutes.

The longest part of the process was migrating the old applications and data to the new Windows 7 install. That took about 90 minutes. The projected times kept changing as PCMover unpacked the moving van.

After PCMover was done, I had to reinstall the computer’s antivirus program and a printer driver. That took about 20 minutes.

As a final step, I started Windows Update and had it download and apply the latest Windows 7 patches. That was the last hour of work – and I’m hesitant to call this work, as I did some reading during most of this 4-hour process. This migration was just too easy.

Image courtesy of Taller Hikari on Flickr via a Creative Commons license.

The producers of LOST have used Fort Street for several location shoots during the last few years. I work on Fort Street Mall, and I usually go down the mall as I head out for my sunrise run.

Today’s LOST location shoot involved a few fake LAPD cars and a strange blue Dodge rentamobile. I’ve posted 3 photos to Flickr. The quality isn’t good, but I don’t carry much when I run, and camphone quality is what it is. It was 7 am and overcast.

On my way back from the shore, I saw a scene being filmed on Beretania Street, in front of Kukui Plaza. It looked like a couple of people in or around a car. There was a lot of shushing and announcements before the cameras rolled.

Most local LOST fans know about Ryan and Jen Ozawa’s podcast, The Transmission. It’s a great source of behind-the-scenes information regarding the show, including a long list of locations.

I host almost all of my web sites, including alohaism.com, kaikaina.com and billso.com, with DreamHost. They do a great job of keeping my web server plugged in and they aren’t expensive.

But over the next 2 days, DreamHost is moving all of its servers to a new data center.

When the move is done, this web site will be back to normal - actually, better than normal is what I’m hoping for.

But between tonight, 18 November 2009, and Friday, 20 November 2009, this site might not be available. I apologize in advance for any problems or outages.

See DreamHost’s status page, including this announcement called Central equipment move, for more details.

Image courtesy of David Hudson Floyd on Flickr via a Creative Commons license

Hawaiian Telcom, the state’s major ILEC, is one step closer to resolving its current bankruptcy filing. Federal Bankruptcy Court Judge Lloyd King approved a reorganization plan yesterday that reduces the company’s debt load from US$1.1 billion to $300 million.

HawTel will market their long-delayed television service as Next Generation Television or NGTV according to an article in today’s Honolulu Star-Bulletin titled HawTel bankruptcy plan OK’d.

HawTel is planning to bundle IPTV with its existing landline and DSL services to create a “triple play” similar to what Oceanic Time Warner Cable offers.

As more viewers decided to watch video on demand (VOD) through Hulu, YouTube and other services, telecom companies are scrambling to offer enhanced VOD solutions to their subscribers. IPTV does provide a good platform for VOD services, but it can be tricky to implement.

Most television viewers in Hawaii live on Oahu, but the state’s PUC may expect HawTel to provide NGTV service on the neighbor islands on an accelerated timetable. Oceanic’s cable TV services on the neighbor islands lag behind Oahu in terms of reliability, capacity and overall speed.

Of course, Oceanic has offered its bundle for a few years and has plenty of customers locked in to the company’s DVRs and services.

Clearwire will roll out its WiMax 4G Clear service on Oahu next month, as described at bytemarks.org, and is already testing wireless IPTV in mainland markets.

There’s one more major hurdle for HawTel’s reorganization - the state Public Utilities Commission must review and approve the reorganization plan. That process could take up to 6 months, and may take some twists and turns as the state grapples with the current recession.

Image courtesy of darkseed on Flickr via a Creative Commons license.

Related pages on billso.com

• 1 December 2008: Hawaiian Telcom files for Chapter 11
• 8 May 2008: Google bets big on Sprint and Clearwire’s WiMax joint venture
• 22 February 2008: Customer lock-in
• 5 February 2008: HawTel replaces CEO with turnaround specialist
• 18 August 2007: HawTel to offer naked DSL and faster downloads
• 11 June 2007: HECO tests smart electric meters
• 7 June 2007: PC Magazine: HawTel, Time Warner Oceanic provide slow Internet connections
• 27 April 2007: IT services are ripe for acquisition
• 21 March 2007: About e-commerce 3: The broadband connection
• 16 November 2006: HawTel claims that system problems are consultants’ fault

I’ve been at the TEDxHonolulu conference today. The organizers assembled was an interesting group of speakers for this first-time event. I also set up a TEDxHonolulu Flickr pool so attendees could contribute their photos from the event.

Click here to view the embedded video.

Several items from the sainthood ceremonies for Father Damien De Veuster are on display at the Cathedral of Our Lady of Peace in downtown Honolulu. The cathedral is on Fort Street Mall, so I took some pictures last evening after class.

The Honolulu Star-Bulletin ran an article called A royal salute to a saint that describes the koa outrigger canoe that is one of my Flickr pictures below. The koa canoe was used to carry a koa box that contained Saint Damien’s left heel bone.

Here’s a new twist on an old malware tactic, in which a victim’s files are encrypted and more or less held for ransom. The malware usually pops up a helpful note or displays a web page that offers software to “fix” the problem.

According to an article in CNET called New Trojan encrypts files but leaves no ransom note, Symantec has identified a Trojan that the company calls Trojan.Ramvicrype. This malware encrypts files on Windows machines, leaving behind directories full of files with .vicrypt extensions. Windows soon begins displaying error messages because the Trojan has encrypted system files as well.

It’s up to the user to do a web search for vicrypt help - a search that may return a web site that sells software to unencrypt vicrypt files.

Of course, that software is probably loaded with more malware - and the victims are paying for it. PC World and Technologizer reported today that malware makers are organized, sophisticated - and targeting users who aren’t running antivirus or security software.

Symantec has developed and posted its own free tool to remove the infection and decrypt the files - it’s available at Trojan.Ramvicrype Removal Tool.

Updated on 4 November 2009: In a Facebook comment about this article, Dale Chun suggested two freemium products that can detect and remove similar malware infections: Malwarebytes or Prevx. These products can handle multiple types of malware, while Symantec’s free removal tool is more specific.

Image by RobertBasil on Flickr via a Creative Commons license.

Related articles on billso.com

• 2 April 2009: Conficker vs DNS
• 17 April 2008: Virtual keyboards and monitoring software foil keystroke loggers
• 2 July 2007: CXOs face malware mail attacks
• 31 October 2006: The top 10 most dangerous online activities
• 6 July 2004: Gartner tells companies to ban iPods from corporate offices

I’m surprised at how many of my students are using Firefox this semester. For the first time, there are more Firefox users than Internet Explorer users in my classes. I’m not sure how many of these students are using Firefox extensions and plugins, however.

One plugin that I do recommend is LinkExtend. It’s free, and provides easy access to helpful information about web sites, including safety and content ratings. Users can also retrieve cached and archived versions of web pages and view estimates of the site’s revenue and financial performance.

It’s easy to install a plugin with Firefox - just go to its web page at Firefox.org, press the install button, then restart your Firefox browser when prompted.

Related articles on billso.com

• 16 June 2008: Firefox 3 is available

This blog, billso.com, now accepts Twitter usernames and passwords as a login method.

Go to http://billso.com/wp-admin/ or use the site’s log in link to try this feature out.

I’ve been using RPXnow to handle OpenID authentication for a while now, but I’ve wanted to add Twitter as an authentication method.

The setup took me all of 10 minutes with RPXnow.

My wife and I went to the air show at Hickam AFB 2009 Open House this past Saturday, 19 September 2009, to watch the USAF Thunderbirds fly and see the airplanes.

An AWACS E-3 from Elmendorf AFB was there, and they actually spun up their radome a few times. I was there with my Flip camera.

And now…  your moment of zen.

Click here to view the embedded video.

I purchased Snow Leopard, otherwise known as Mac OS X 10.6, a week ago. I’ve upgraded all 3 of my Macs in the last few days. I reclaimed at least 7 GB of hard drive space on one Mac, and got 18 GB back on my Mac Mini.

I reviewed an unofficial wiki called Mac OS X 10.6 Snow Leopard compatibility list a few days before I started, and updated a couple of applications before I ran each upgrade.

The Mac Mini and MacBook upgrades were easy enough - just a couple of hours to complete the upgrade process. No drama, no fail.

My MacBook Pro, which dates back to 2006, was the last of three to get upgraded. It delivered one surprise. The screen’s backlight wouldn’t work during the upgrade process.

Fortunately, a quick Google search revealed a thread that discussed this very problem: see OS 10.6 - Snow Leopard Install Failed on my MacBook Pro - How I fixed it!

There are more elegant approaches, but I used a very bright flashlight to help me read the screen and finish the upgrade. Crude, but effective. After the upgrade, the brightness keys started working again and I could see the screen.

I haven’t had a problem since then. Other users have tried different approaches, as described in this Reddit page called Black screen while installing Snow Leopard on a Macbook Pro? It’s not frozen, the backlight is simply switched off.

At some point, HPU’s IT department will say it’s OK for me to upgrade the iMac in my office to Snow Leopard. When that happens, I’ll have a chance to see the 64-bit kernel in action. I’ve tried this free Startup Mode Selector on a couple of my Macs, just to see what hardware I have.

Image by rofanator on flickr via a Creative Commons license

Monday’s TechCrunch article called Bloglines on life support. this story needs an ending brought back some memories, as I stopped using Bloglines a while back. IAC can’t even give away the Bloglines service to a potential buyer.

When I started reading RSS feeds several years ago, I used Bloglines.com as my aggregator. For a while, I posted my blog articles on Bloglines. I’ve imported many of those articles to billso.com. See my articles called This blog has a history and This blog has more history for more details.

Back in 2006, I actually had group assignments in my graduate courses that required students to use Bloglines for finding and commenting on news articles. It was a fun experiement, but the clunky Bloglines editing software really frustrated some students. From the reports I’ve read, Bloglines hasn’t fixed many of their problems since then.

Farewell, FriendFeed.com

Since May 2008, I’ve relied on FriendFeed as a crowdsourced aggregator and filter that also consolidates most of my social media activity, including my Twitter feed at @billso. I demonstrated FriendFeed for my 2008 EMBA course at HPU. Mashable.com has an excellent description of how FriendFeed works in an article called How to: Take advantage of FriendFeed’s unique features

But FriendFeed’s days seem numbered, as Facebook announced they would purchase FriendFeed on Monday, 10 August 2009. It’s more of a talent deal than a service acquisition, as the 12 FriendFeed staffers have already moved into Facebook.com office space. Facebook needs the expertise that the FriendFeed team already has. See the official FriendFeed announcement called FriendFeed accepts Facebook friend request for more details. TechCrunch has a fun article with pics from the actual closing of the deal at Pics: The Facebook/FriendFeed deal signed under the cover of night.

I’ve read several rants from angry FriendFeed users who feel betrayed by this deal. For an example, see Shawn Farner’s article called Stabbed in the back by FriendFeed.

I’ve also seen some well-written responses, including:

• This article by Louis Gray called Hi Facebook, it’s me, FriendFeed. This relationship? It’s complicated.
• This ReadWriteWeb article by Marshall Kirkpatrick called Is a Perfect Storm Forming For Distributed Social Networking?
• This nicefishfilms.com article by Michael Sean Wright called FriendFeed Accepts Facebook Friend Request - What Now?

As much as I’ve enjoyed using FriendFeed, I knew the company would be acquired eventually and the FriendFeed service would probably disappear. FriendFeed.com was a real-time demonstration of social media aggregation and messaging - and Facebook finally made their bid.

I’d have preferred to see FriendFeed acquired by Google - a logical move as several FriendFeed executives were Gmail alumni.

Ta-ta, Twitter?

But I’m happy that Facebook didn’t buy Twitter. While Twitter.com is unstable, brown to spam attacks and in desperate need of adult supervision, Facebook management should not waste time and energy on fixing Twitter.

The hype cycle for microblogging is also headed towards a downturn, according to Gartner’s analysts and this article called Twitter: It’s all downhill from here.

Image courtesy of jose.armenteros on Flickr via Common Commons license.

I’m not in Chicago for the 2009 annual meeting of the Academy of Management this weekend. I’d love to attend, but I’m grading papers for the two graduate seminars I’ve been teaching this summer here in Honolulu.

This year’s conference theme is green management, so am I honoring the theme by not flying 4250 miles to Chicago? Perhaps.

But I will be watching the tweets! The conference organizers have asked participants to use #AOM2009 as a Twitter hashtag, and I’ve already posted some tagged tweets as @billso

The Academy also has an official Twitter account that will be used to post conference news: @AOMConnect

There is a dedicated web page for displaying these tweets at #AOM2009 Twitter Updates and most Twitter clients can display search results.

I’ve posted a Twitter search widget below. It works in the mobile version of this article if you are using an iPhone, and it should work on Windows and Mac browsers.

The widget is also available at http://billso.com/aom2009/

I had a blast at last Friday’s Social Media Club Hawaii meeting. at ING Direct Cafe in Waikiki. I recorded the entire panel discussion on my audio recorder.

It’s in two parts, because we took a networking break halfway through the panel discussion.

• Part 1
• Part 2

Andy Bumatai was our witty moderator.

The panel members were:

• Arleen Anderson
• Erika Engle
• Nathan Kam
• Bill Sodeman

Special thanks to the following folks from Social Media Club Hawaii for setting up the event and inviting the panel:

• Roxanne Darling
• Kelly Mitchell
• Tess Staadecker

I’m part of a panel discussion on ethics in social media this Friday, July 10 at the ING Direct Cafe in Waikiki. See the Social Media Club Hawaii site and an article called July 10 Meeting: Ethics in Social Media for more details.

If you can’t attend the meeting, there should be a live video stream starting around 5:30 PM Hawaii Time.

Roxanne Darling has posted Ethics in Social Media: A Glossary, including several relevant terms, models and concepts.

I’ll be discussing some concepts from the field of business ethics, including:

• privacy issues
• self-tests for ethical behavior
• regulation schemes for the social media, advertising and marketing industries

If you have a question that you’d like me to address, use the form at the Social Media Club Hawaii site, or DM me on Twitter or Facebook.

UPDATED 9 JULY 2009, 13:34

Here’s a list of interesting articles that I’ve been reading on this topic.

• The Word of Mouth Marketing Association Ethics Code
• 18 May 2009: Benn Rosales, NAR Code of Ethics rules for Social Media, Realtors and Associations
• 12 February 2009: David Gelles, Social media and blogging ethics and a code of conduct
• 7 October 2008: Chris Brogan, The ethics imperative in social media
• 27 November 2007: Kami Watson Huyse, Astroturfing and the American Way: A Code of Ethics for the Choir to Live By
• 14 September 2007: David Jones, Ogilvy PR’s blogger outreach code of ethics
• 24 October 2006: Social Media Club, Talking about disclosure

According to an article by Brian Krebs in today’s Washington Post, it’s easier than we thought to guess anyone’s Social Security number because the Federal Government is using a poorly designed set of algorithms to assign numbers to applicants. You can start by checking the Death Master File for individuals who were born around the date and geographic place of your target.

See this page, which includes a FAQ on journal article by Carnegie Mellon University researchers Alessandro Acquisti and Ralph Gross called Predicting Social Security numbers from public data. (http://dx.doi.org/10.1073/pnas.0904891106) The article is available for free as an abstract and in full text (PDF).

One section of the Post’s report sent chills down my spine:

Linda Foley, founder of the Identity Theft Resource Center, a San Diego based nonprofit, cited another potential problem. She said many businesses have errantly rely upon or have moved to redact all but the last four digits of a person’s SSN, the very digits that are most unique to an individual.

“Because of the way the SSN has been designed, asking for the last four numbers of the SSN puts people at risk because those are the only numbers that are unique to you and cannot be guessed easily by someone who might want to use your identity,” Foley said.

Ars Technica also has an article called http://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/news/2009/07/social-insecurity-numbers-open-to-hacking.ars with some additional discussion.

Image courtesy of _saturnine on Flickr via a Creative Commons license.

The digital television (DTV) cutover in the United States finally happened yesterday (12 June 2009). The FCC reports that over 700,000 calls have been received at 1-888-CALL-FCC and other hotlines. Web sites like http://www.dtv.gov/ have been flooded with users, too. Chicago, Dallas-Fort Worth, New York City, Philadelphia and Boston generated the most call volume.

The DTV cutover happened here in Hawaii on 15 January 2009, and has been happening in stages across the USA since then. Calls about how to use DTV converter boxes accounted for 30% of the calls. Another 20% of the calls concerned re-scanning issues. When the cutover happened, some converter boxes needed to find the DTV channels again.

See this Associated Press article called Digital TV hot line gets 700,000 calls over switch for more details.

New services

The cutover finally allows US businesses to offer new telecommunications services based on DTV. The Wall Street Journal mentions Qualcomm’s FLO TV, a service that lets Verizon and AT&T mobile users in 39 US cities watch live television on high-end mobile phones. Both mobile carriers will get access to the old analog television channels, which will be used to expand mobile bandwidth and improve data speeds.

See Business Opportunities Open Up With US Digital TV Shift and this SFGate article called FLO TV finally comes to the Bay Area after DTV transition for more details.

Image courtesy of craig1black on flickr through a Creative Commons license.

Related pages and posts on billso.com

• Digital television
• 15 January 2009: Hawaii’s move to digital TV surprises some residents
• 15 December 2008: All day digital TV test in Hawaii
• 31 May 2008: Advertisers worried about digital television conversion
• 16 May 2008: Want to test your digital television in Hawaii?
• 25 March 2008: Digital TV is coming
• 18 January 2008: Digital TV and business models
• 12 November 2007: I want a better television - but it’s not ready yet
• 12 September 2007: The Google Phone and the iPhone – both looking for software and spectrum
• 5 July 2004: San Diego Padres promote HDTV

Jerry Jones wanted the Dallas Cowboys’ new football stadium to be the biggest and best he could build.

Leave it to Jerry Jones to buy the world’s largest HDTVs for his new stadium.

According to Dallas Cowboys Show Off Their Big New TV on the Dallas Observer’s Sportatorium blog, the video weighs 600 tons, hangs 90 feet above the playing field, and has its own 10-story elevator.

Click here to view the embedded video.

There are more photos in the Observer’s blog, and at the Cowboys’ and the city of Arlington’s stadium sites.

One of the most popular pages on billso.com is my APA style and formatting page. All of the graduate programs at my university require APA formatting in written assignments. When I first started teaching at HPU in 2002, I had never used APA style, so I had to learn about the topic while I was teaching my courses. I wrote short handouts with examples of APA formatting. In 2004, I had posted an early version of my APA page to one of my web sites.

The APA will release the 6th edition of the Publication Manual on 1 July 2009. The major changes include a more comprehensive system for identifying electronic references.

The new manual also asks writers to include a DOI (digital object identifier) for each reference list entry. Each DOI is a permanent web link to an article or book. Students tend to list their university library’s document, which isn’t helpful when the reader doesn’t have access to that library. There are millions of articles and books that have DOIs, but because there are registration fees involved, it’s not a comprehensive system.

I’ve added a new page to billso.com about DOI, and I’m starting to update my APA page, too.

I’ve been using FriendFeed for over a year now. It’s a great little aggregation site that consolidates my activities from several social media and networking sites. FriendFeed is run by a few Google alumni, and yesterday they released a beta version of the site’s interface at http://beta.friendfeed.com. It looks a lot like Twitter, even though FriendFeed offers many more features than Twitter does.

Lists and filters are important tools for using FF well. Otherwise, it’s very easy to be overwhelmed by FF. The real-time updates in FriendFeed, in which new messages are constantly scrolling down the screen, is impressive and intimidating.

Ryan Ozawa, a fellow Oahu-based blogger who also uses Twitter and FriendFeed, posted an article this morning called “FriendFeed: What If Twitter Worked?” It’s worthwhile reading, as Ryan makes his case that Twitter suffers from stability issues, sometimes referred to as the “fail whale” syndrome. Twitter is a simple enough service, so it’s attracting thousands of new users every day. As more users join Twitter, the service has problems supporting the added volume.

I like Twitter’s UI - it’s minimal, and a bit like Google. MySpace and Facebook have as much visual clutter as Yahoo.

Ruby is taking some of the blame for Twitter’s twoubles, as Twitter API developer Alex Payne announced that Scala is the new language of choice: see Twitter jilts Ruby for Scala for some background.

Related posts and pages on billso.com

9 January 2009: Phishers hit Twitter
7 January 2009: How Twitter got hacked
15 August 2008: Mobile social media sites
31 July 2008: Manoa Geeks meeting and social networking
9 July 2008: Is email in danger from microblogging?
23 May 2008: My social networking activity

Yesterday, the Conficker.c Windows worm was scheduled to change its behavior - and this family of malware did so. The worm now uses a list of 50,000 domains to check for new command-and-control instructions. Conficker didn’t crack the Internet in half, but the publicity about this worm has caused more users and system administrators to check and patch their computers. PC World’s article by Ian Paul titled Conficker D-Day Arrives: Worm Phones Home (Quietly) has more details.

One challenge is that this expanded list of domains includes valid web sites that have been hacked. When Conficker.c attacks a computer, it also attempts to edit that computers hosts file, which is usually empty on most residential computers. The hosts file is a leftover from the old days of the Internet - before the Domain Name System (DNS) existed, each computer had to have a complete list of addresses that it could contact. Today, computers still check the hosts file to see if a domain name is listed there. It’s used as a shortcut, as a DNS transaction will take more time to complete.

Conficker.c fills the hosts file with entries for major antivirus and software companies. These entries redirect the DNS request to other web sites, to block the user from downloading or using software to remove the malware infection. Simply blocking the Conficker domains isn’t appropriate, as some of these domains may be fixed soon. It’s also possible that some of these domains have nothing to do with Conficker at all. Of course, Conficker may update its list on a regular basis, in an effort to evade blocks.

Fighting back

OpenDNS is reporting at least 300 Conficker connection attempts per second on its domain name system.According to their analysis, computers in the US aren’t making most of these requests. The traffic is coming from Vietnam, Brazil, Philippines, Indonesia and Algeria - countries where broadband Internet service is available and software piracy is rampant. Pirated software usually doesn’t include a valid license for downloading or applying updates and patches that can stop malware infections.

As I mentioned in my previous articles, OpenDNS is a free service that, among other benefits, has been blocking Conficker and other malware for a few months now. With a free OpenDNS account, it’s very easy to see if your computers have been trying to access Conficker or malware domains.

See Neil Rubenking’s article called OpenDNS: title and the OpenDNS blog article titled Do you have Conficker? Find out in your OpenDNS account for more details.

Rubenking has another article (How to Tell if ‘Conficker’ Caught You, and What to Do) with links to a few tips and tests if you’re worried about Conficker.

One of these links is the Conficker Eye Chart,  a page that residential users can load for a very quick scan of their system. The page tries to load images from servers that Conficker usually blocks. If some of the images won’t load, you’ve either got connection problems or a malware infection. If none of the images load, you may have turned off images in your browser - a time-honored trick for increasing browser speed. The test is not fool-proof, especially if you’re using a corporate or university network. This test doesn’t work if you’re using a proxy server.

Image courtesy of Oran Viriyincy through a Creative Commons license.

Related posts and pages on billso.com

• OpenDNS
• 28 March 2009: More about the Conficker/Downadup worm
• 24 March 2009: I’m on the Andy Bumatai show discussing the Conficker/Downadout worm
• 25 July 2008: Fixing the DNS security hole
• 15 January 2008: OpenDNS update
• 13 July 2007: Speed up your broadband connection with OpenDNS

After my appearance on the Andy Bumatai Show last Tuesday, I received a flurry of questions and kudos regarding the Conficker.C worm, also known as Kido or Downadup. This worm is supposed to change its behavior on 1 April 2009, and the publicity has given the bloggersphere and mainstream media a new reason to discuss computer security. The archived video for my segment is not on YouTube, but it is available at www.theandybumatiaishow.com - you’ll have to:

1. Turn on the video viewer
2. Hit the on-demand button
3. Click the Andy Bumatai Online show tab,
4. Look for the archived show for March 24, 2009 and
5. Choose Segment 2.

I had a blast doing this show - Andy is a great interviewer, and the questions from our online audience were great. I hadn’t been to ING’s Waikiki location before - it looked more like a coffeehouse than a bank!

How to tell if your computer is infected by Conficker

Ken Colburn on CNN has identified two signs that your Windows computer might be infected with Conficker. The worm tries to shut down automatic Windows updates, and also attempts to block the Windows Update site itself. If Windows Update isn’t working on your computer, try an official alternate site like http://safety.live.com If you’re still having issues, it might be time to get professional help to remove the worm. In the meantime, disconnect that computer from your Internet connection so the worm can’t use the connection or your data. The main points of this segment are shown in the following screencap. The misspelling of “anti-virus” is an added bonus from CNN. The CNN video is also available at this page.

[cnn=/video/tech/2009/03/28/dcl.data.doc.computer.worm.cnn, LEFT, NOAUTOPLAY]

Be prepared

Once again, this worm affects only Windows computers. If you’re using a Mac and you don’t have Windows installed on that computer, you are in fine shape. The major antivirus companies already have updates and cleaners ready. Just make sure your antivirus is up to date. If you’re not running an antivirus program, try Avast. It’s free for home users.

Never ever try to run two or more antivirus programs on your computer! It’s a recipe for disaster, as each antivirus program might think the other is a virus or worm.

In an odd twist, searching Google for Conficker worm remedies tends to bring up far too many programs that actually try to install malware and worms instead of removing these programs. As I mentioned on Andy’s show, one program that I have used with good results is SpywareBlaster. It doesn’t remove spyware and worms, but it can close many of the holes and browser issues that spyware developers like to exploit.

Block that worm with OpenDNS and a strong password

I do recommend using OpenDNS as a quick and free fix. If your computer hasn’t been hit by this worm, OpenDNS will block the web sites that Conficker uses - and give you a nice speed boost in the process. OpenDNS won’t help you if your computer is infected, but it will stop the worm from spreading to other computers.

One point I neglected to mention during Andy’s show is that this worm tries to hack into Windows accounts by using a dictionary attack. It’s never a good idea to use a password that is an actual word, but this type of attack tends to work because so many users ignore that advice. See my articles about passphrases and secure passwords for some tips.

For a quick fix, add a punctuation mark, symbol or a number somewhere in your password - and not at the beginning or end of the password. It’s best to stick with symbols that are on your computer’s keyboard, but be aware that some web sites do not allow these types of characters in passwords.

Related posts and pages on billso.com

• OpenDNS
• 24 March 2009: I’m on the Andy Bumatai show discussing the Conficker/Downadout worm
• 25 July 2008: Fixing the DNS security hole
• 24 April 2008: Change that password into a passphrase
• 15 January 2008: OpenDNS update
• 13 July 2007: Speed up your broadband connection with OpenDNS
• 11 January 2007: How to create a secure password

It’s so much easier to post and record video to the web these days. I used my iPhone and 12seconds.tv’s app to make a 12-second long video of yesterday’s St. Patrick’s Day celebration in downtown Honolulu.

[iPhone] St Patrick’s day in Honolulu on 12seconds.tv

On a computer, users, can actually record and submit 12 seconds worth of video. On an iPhone, the app lets users take or pick three photos, and then uses the microphone to record the audio.

Some of my web sites, including billso.com and billso.info, were down between 4 and 8 March 2009. Dreamhost moved my account to a new and faster server - but forgot to tell me about the move. When I checked my sites, I got error messages.

Dreamhost support admitted that they should have given my 72 hours prior notice, so I’d have time to do a complete backup and checkout on my sites. With some lead time, I probably could have had everything restored within an hour of the server migration. I love DH, so I’m not going to fault them because part of the problem is my own fracking fault.

I use a WordPress plugin called WordPress Database Backup to run a daily backup of each site’s MySQL tables, which hold the articles, pages and data for each site. Without those tables, there’s no blog.

When I restored billso.com, the entire site came back online - except for one feature. The RSS feed on billso.com wasn’t resolving at all. I checked Google for some tips, edited a couple of WordPress files and restored the RSS service.

I also discovered during the database restoration process that I hadn’t backed up all of the tables for one of the blogs. WordPress plugins sometimes set up their own tables to record information on posts, pages or users. On that one blog, I failed to include three tables in the scheduled daily backup.

I will restore billso.info this weekend. That server is an experimental lifestream which should aggregate my activities on several different services, including Twitter and FriendFeed.

On 31 January 2009, a Google employee more less shut down Google’s search engines when he left one forward slash – the / symbol – in a text file listing of web sites suspected of hosting malware.

When that text file was uploaded into Google’s search system, all heck broke lose. The forward slash is used as a short cut or wildcard to exclude an entire folder or site from Google searches.

The file was obtained from StopBadware.org, an organization that collects information about web sites and malware. Google uses one of this group’s list to flag search results that may lead to malware.

When the wildcard was used by itself, on a single line of the file, Google’s search engine interpreted that as an entry for EVERY web site on the public Internet.

So for about 40 minutes, every Google search result was flagged with the message “This site may harm your computer” – even if that web site was safe to use.

There’s a few more details in this Google blog article called “This site may harm your computer” on every search result?!?!

Image provided by lampbane on flickr through a Creative Commons license.

Most of Hawaii switched to full power digital television a few hours ago at noon Hawaiian Time on Thursday, 15 January 2009.

Apparently, hundreds of Hawaii residents have ignored months of public service advertisements, tests, and crawls on their old analog television sets. They finally realized that their analog television service had ended when a 7-minute “digital night light” segment began appearing on the local analog television channels instead of regularly scheduled programming.

This week, both Honolulu newspapers have run front-page stories on the transition. See Hawaii makes DTV switch tomorrow from the Honolulu Star-Bulletin for an example.

According to the Associated Press, FCC and broadcaster hotlines have been flooded with calls this week about the transition. See Hawaii takes closely watched digital TV plunge for more details.

Most residents of Oahu use digital cable or satellite television, so they already have the proper set-top boxes. Residents who had spliced into the analog cable signal may have lost their stolen service today, however. Basic cable service in Hawaii still works, as Ryan Ozawa pointed out in his comments below. See Oceanic Time Warner’s FAQ page for more details.

Thousands of viewers in rural areas of Oahu, Maui and the island of Hawaii rely on broadcast television. Because digital signals tend to have lower power than analog signals, residents may not receive digital service on channels that had usable analog signals.

Kauai relies on low-power analog repeaters, so that island has received an extension for its analog service.

The FCC allowed the state of Hawaii to cut over to digital television a month early, so that analog transmission towers could be taken down ahead of the kestrel’s dark-rumped petrel’s mating season.

Related articles and pages on billso.com

• Digital television
• 15 December 2008: All day digital TV test in Hawaii
• 31 May 2008: Advertisers worried about digital television conversion
• 16 May 2008: Want to test your digital television in Hawaii?
• 25 March 2008: Digital TV is coming
• 18 January 2008: Digital TV and business models
• 12 November 2007: I want a better television - but it’s not ready yet
• 12 September 2007: The Google Phone and the iPhone – both looking for software and spectrum
• 5 July 2004: San Diego Padres promote HDTV

Interesting news, but Seattle would still have a newspaper left if the P-I stopped publishing a dead tree edition. If Hearst shutters the Houston or San Francisco Chronicle, that’s a different story.

Originally posted as a comment by Bill Sodeman on The Inquisitr using Disqus.

Kudos to PsychMamma for these two ways to network your blog:

Condron.us presents random blog postings from around the world. to add your blog, just sign up at the home page and add a new post to your blog. Benefia has some thoughts about how this system works in an article called Condron.us as a WEB Ferris Wheel.

alphainventions.com lets users insert a blog’s URL into a loop of randomly displayed articles. Links to social bookmarking services including delicious and StumbleUpon are also displayed with each random article. Another user will eventually bump your URL from the rotation, so you might calendar a weekly reminder to reenter your URL.

How many favorites have you saved on Twitter in the last 24 hours?

TwtPoll.com lets users set up short surveys that can be sent on Twitter, so I thought I’d do a sanity check. I save a lot of favorites on Twitter - usually tweets with shortcut links that I can check later in the day.

The poll questions and results are available here.

When I wrote my billso.com article about the attacks on Twitter, I made some reasonable guesses about how the attacks might have been staged by using some phishing techniques.

While there was a spate of Twitter phishing attacks over the past weekend, it now appears that most, if not all, of the hijacked celebrity Twitter accounts were not phishing victims. Twitter admitted in the Monday Morning Madness blog post that they were victims of a different kind of attack.

Wired’s Threat Level blog reported yesterday that the initial attack was actually a dictionary attack on a Twitter employee’s account. That initial attack was successful because:

• Twitter’s login system kept presenting a fresh login screen instead of cutting the user off after several incorrect passwords
• Crystal’s password was a common dictionary word: happiness. The attack would have failed if Crystal had chosen a reasonably strong password or passphrase, or included one or two symbols or numbers in the original password. See my billso.com article from 24 April 2008 called Change that password into a passphrase
• Crystal’s Twitter account also had access to Twitter’s corporate account management tools that let the hacker hijack any Twitter account they wished to use.

Wired’s article called Weak Password Brings ‘Happiness’ to Twitter Hacker has more details and a YouTube video that hacker GMZ offered to support his claims.

“You are the weakest link”

Damon Cortesi pointed out in his 6 January 2009 guest editorial called The inevitable rise (and fall?) of ‘twishing’, Twitter users seem more than willing to follow links sent through direct messages (DMs) from their Twitter contacts. On 5 January 2009, I pointed out a similar issue in this billso.com article called Phishers hit Twitter. It’s a well-known flaw in Twitter.

Twitter has some self-regulating features built in to the service, and it’s easy for users to stop following contacts. Twitter doesn’t have any sort of spam filtering, however.

Damon’s guest post appeared on Jennifer Leggio’s blog a week after Jennifer wrote that Twitter would get phished sometime soon. See her article called FriendFeed, Twitter address URL redirection risks; Facebook, LinkedIn, MySpace lag behind.

Jennifer also appeared on Jim Turner’s talk show yesterday, along with Chris Messina, to discuss Twitter’s bad weekend. See Social Media Security and the Twitter Phishing Trip to hear the audio recording and read the chat transcript.

At least one of the third parties that provide Twitter-related services have started posting or explaining their privacy policies this week. Mr. Tweet has a reasonable explanation called Addressing Privacy Concerns. Over the next few days, I expect a few more sites to post their own explanations.

Related articles and pages on billso.com

• OpenID
• Twitter
• 5 January 2009: Phishers hit Twitter
• 31 October 2008: A few new features
• 18 October 2008: OpenID, ID Selector and WordPress
• 15 October 2008: Mobile social media sites
• 18 July 2008: RIP CAPTCHA
• 9 July 2008: Is email in danger from microblogging?
• 7 July 2008: The battle against Twitter spam
• 2 June 2008: PayPal’s security key still needs work
• 13 May 2008: JanRain launches CallVerifID multifactor phone service for OpenID
• 10 May 2008: Why use OpenID?
• 24 April 2008: Change that password into a passphrase
• 30 April 2008: Updating WP-OpenID to support ID Selector
• 11 January 2007: How to create a secure password

If you’re reading billso.com via RSS, please change your subscription to this feed: http://billso.com/feed

Yes, that link is the default WordPress RSS feed. The default feed actually works much better than the FeedBurner service for billso.com, which was located at http://rss.billso.com/billsocom and http://feeds.feedburner.com/Billsocom

FeedBurner tended to strip out most of the article content, providing only a summary.

The new billso.com feed contains the complete article content for the most recent posts.

Those two FeedBurner feeds will remain active until 4 February 2009.

Related articles on billso.com

• 19 July 2008: How RSS can help you
• 22 April 2008: It’s 2008 and e-mail is still broken
• 21 February 2008: Copyright and fair use
• 3 September 2007: Class changes and cancellations - Pipeline or RSS?
• 3 April 2007: Web 2.0 and the library
• 15 March 2007: About e-commerce part 1: Maximizing ROI
• 5 February 2007: Washington Post replaces e-mail newsletter with blog, RSS
• 23 September 2006: What is RSS?
• 20 August 2006: What is RSS?

Over the past weekend, phishers have been targeting Twitter users with direct messages or DMs that include a link. Twitter management has acknowledged the problem, and revealed in this morning’s blog post that 33 accounts were affected - see Monday Morning Madness for details.

The link that is sent in these phishing messages usually opens up a page that asks the targeted user to enter their Twitter username and password. Once the phisher captures the credentials, they login to the victim’s account, change the password and email address, and start sending out DMs to everyone on the victim’s contact list. The direct messages usually include a link that promises something valuable like a gas card or a gift card.

Twitter’s profile management system allows users to log in and change their email address without any confirmation step. So as long as someone has another user’s Twitter credentials, it’s very easy to hijack a twitter account. SO far, it appears that the following Twitter accounts are among those that were hijacked over the weekend:

• Barack Obama
• Britney Spears
• CNN
• Fox News Network
• Facebook

Dozens of web sites have set up legitimate services that provide statistics, filters, photo sharing and other features for Twitter users. My tweets show up in my Facebook status message, and in my pages on FriendFeed. I didn’t have to give my Twitter password to FriendFeed, as that site is just reading the RSS feed of my Twitter posts. Twitter’s Facebook app needs my twitter username and password, however.

Almost all of these sites ask users to provide the Twitter username. Any 3rd party site that wants to post a message or tweet on the user’s behalf also asks for the user’s Twitter password, as that credential is required to post these tweets. There are plenty of examples, including

• Tweetake.com, which lets users download and backup their messages and contact list.
• Twitpics.com, which lets users post, tag and comment on pictures.
• TwitTangle.com, which lets users rate and tag their Twitter contacts
• PeopleBrowsr.com, which lets users view their Twitter messages and friends’ profiles.
• TwitOrFit.com, which lets users vote on Twitter profile pictures.

I’m not surprised that this kind of attack has been so successful. Twitter users have been conditioned to provide to their twitter credentials to sites 3rd party sites. As Michael Arrington of TechCrunch pointed out today in his article called Twitter Gets Hacked, Badly, Twitter needs to do more work on its APIs and authentication systems.

Twitter is a tempting target, as users can only receive DMs from other Twitter users who have included them as a contact. Users tend to assume that a DM comes from a trusted user.

The simplest solution is for Twitter to send an email message to a user whenever their account information has been changed. The email message should include a link to review and confirm the changes. This would give the user an opportunity to stop an unauthorized email address change.

Twitter might consider using a multifactor authentication that requires the user to enter a PIN number received sent by Twitter through a text or email message. This kind of system has been used by OpenID providers like JanRain, as I mentioned on 13 May 2008 in my billso.com article called JanRain launches CallVerifID multifactor phone service for OpenID.

Twitter could also consider a security key like financial institutions use, to give Twitter users an additional password. See my billso.com article from 2 June 2008 called Paypal’s security key still needs work for more details.

Of course, multifactor authentication could get expensive for Twitter. The company is still privately funded, and a mutlifactor system would require changes to Twitter’s API, as well as changes to any third-party site that integrates with Twitter.

Last month, Pete Cashmore of Mashable suggested that Twitter add Facebook Connect as an authentication system. I added Facebook Connect as an authentication system for billso.com on Christmas Day 2008, by moving my comment management system to Disqus. billso.com still supports OpenID as an authentication method, too. See the article called Twitter, We Are Poking You To Fix Your Facebook App for more details.

There’s been little comment from Twitter’s founders on this issues, and only a few official blog posts that advise users to be cautious. Twitter also has a short message on its own web site reminding users to be careful. As Marshall Kirkpatrick of ReadWriteWeb points out in his article called Twitter security collapses, Twitter needs to solve these security problems quickly.

Related articles and pages on billso.com

• OpenID
• Twitter
• 7 January 2008: How Twitter got hacked
• 5 January 2009: Phishers hit Twitter
• 31 October 2008: A few new features
• 18 October 2008: OpenID, ID Selector and WordPress
• 15 October 2008: Mobile social media sites
• 18 July 2008: RIP CAPTCHA
• 9 July 2008: Is email in danger from microblogging?
• 7 July 2008: The battle against Twitter spam
• 2 June 2008: PayPal’s security key still needs work
• 13 May 2008: JanRain launches CallVerifID multifactor phone service for OpenID
• 10 May 2008: Why use OpenID?
• 30 April 2008: Updating WP-OpenID to support ID Selector

Some social media folks here in Hawaii have been promoting a special hashtag - #aloha09 - to mark the best of Hawaii in 2009. There’s a tracking page to follow these messages at aloha09.808talk.com and an article about the project at Aloha 2009.

A hashtag is a short string of text that can be inserted into a microblogging post on services like Twitter. Microblogging messages are usually very short, but a hashtag helps users search across an entire service for messages about a specific event. The Twitter Fan Wiki has a good article about hashtags.

Another popular hashtag today has been #happy09, which promotes positive thinking during 2009.

It’s easy to find popular hashtags by checking a service like hashtags.org that tracks and charts Twitter traffic. Twitter.com and many Twitter clients have a search feature that can also find messages with hashtags.

We did the evening tour last night at Iolani Palace, which was held in honor of Queen Kapiolani’s birthday.

Images above and below courtesy of billso on flickr via a Creative Commons license.

Around 7 pm last night, the power went out in our downtown Honolulu condo. My wife kept her Windows laptop on while we pulled out candles, batteries, a radio and flashlights.

Then I hopped onto my iPhone and started twittering. Within 15 minutes, it was apparent that most of Oahu had lost their electricity. We decided to stay home and listen to the radio.

The Associated Press story called Hawaii’s Oahu island regains power after blackout provides a quick summary of the night.

All in all, the experience was a lot smoother than the 2006 blackout. There was no earthquake this time, but it was a Friday night with plenty of people out on the streets to go to parties, events and concerts.

A HECO representative who was dispatched to KSSK radio confirmed that lightning strikes had damaged several transmission lines near the Keha generation facility, forcing Oahu’s electric utility to start load shedding.

Read Nathan Kam’s article Lightning dances across Oahu skies - he’s also posted a YouTube video of last night’s cloud lightning - it’s called Amazing lightning show across Oahu skies.

Keha 4 eventually shut down, setting up a black start scenario similar to the 15 October 2006 earthquake.

Early in the blackout, Ryan Ozawa suggested a Twitter hashtag of #hipower. hashtags are short strings of text that Twitter users can include in their messages, to help other users find content regarding a location or event.

By 10 pm there were a couple of hundred messages in that category. You can read these messages using this Twitter search link.

Ryan also managed to post an article called Honolulu Power Outage Covered Online from his MacBook and Sprint EVDO connection.

John Garcia used Twitter to chronicle his efforts as he helped assemble the Honolulu Advertiser’s digital edition. The Advertiser decided to upload the PDF page proofs for this morning’s edition, as there was no power for the printing presses. It’s understandable considering the circumstances, and the Advertiser did publish an article called Advertiser apologizes for no print edition today.

The Honolulu Star-Bulletin had similar problems. See their article called Oahu getting power back gradually.

KGMB channel 9 (CBS) set up a live streaming video feed. There are some details in this video called Blackout Behind the Scenes at KGMB9 . KHNL channel 8 (NBC) sent its reporters out into the epic traffic jams to gather news.

A few minutes ago, Russ posted a blog entry called Home - Waialae/Kahala - Hele Broadband about his residential Internet connection. Twitter reports and KSSK indicated that Time Warner Oceanic’s Road Runner and VoIP services went down during the blackout.

Our Verizon and AT&T mobile phones kept their connections, and I had 3G service throughout the blackout.

Capsun Poe posted his experiences in an article called
The Big Bad Boxing day Blackout of 2008.

Related articles and pages on billso.com

• Oahu blackouts
• 11 April 2008: Cellular base station uses wind and solar power
• 19 October 2006: Preventing an Oahu blackout is hard work
• 17 October 2006: Governor considers emergency radio station, airport power
• 17 October 2006: Oahu cell phone network was overloaded after the quake
• 17 October 2006:Clear Channel, KSSK cited for late response
• 17 October 2006: Honolulu mayor says plan worked well
• 17 October 2006: Legislators plan investigation over Oahu power outage
• 16 October 2006: Why was the entire island blacked out?
• 16 October 2006: 16 hours later…

Even the “old man” would be jealous of this Christmas ornament! Truly I have received a fragile, battery powered major award.

If you’re not familiar with the trivia motherlode that accompanies A Christmas Story, read this article called “What’s inside ‘A Christmas Story’”, check out the TBS and IMDB pages for the film, or head over to Wikipedia.

Images courtesy of billso on flickr via a Creative Commons license.

The major award and the soft glow of "electric sex"

billso and his miniature major award.

Have a happy winter holiday season, everyone!

Thanks to my readers who keep coming back to billso.com week after week.

If you’re new here, I’ve got a few years worth of articles to keep you entertained and informed.

Here’s some video I recorded of Sunday night’s excellent Tuba Christmas concert at Ward Warehouse. Click on this link to see a larger HD version. 

Click here to view the embedded video.

Something to think about as we close out 2008 and prepare for 2009, a year of change. Sheer numbers can win the battle… sometimes.

Click here to view the embedded video.

For billso.com readers who live in Hawaii and use television antennas for their reception, today (Monday, 15 December 2008) is a great opportunity to test your televisions for the upcoming digital conversion. Just tune into channel 9 between 4:30 am and 10:30 pm.

If a crawl appears on the bottom of your screen, you’ll need to get a converter box, or subscribe to cable or satellite service. If you already have cable or satellite service and you see that warning crawl, you may need a replacement converter box from your television provider.

While most of the mainland’s broadcasters will switch to DTV on 17 February 2009, almost all of the state of Hawaii will switch on 15 January 2009. Viewers on Kauai will continue to receive analog broadcasts from the low-power stations on their island, with a digital conversion scheduled at a later date.

See KGMB9 to begin digital TV testing on Monday in the Honolulu Advertiser for more information.

Click here to view the embedded video.

Related posts and pages on billso.com

• Digital television
• 31 May 2008: Advertisers worried about digital television conversion
• 16 May 2008: Want to test your digital television in Hawaii?
• 25 March 2008: Digital TV is coming
• 18 January 2008: Digital TV and business models
• 12 November 2007: I want a better television - but it’s not ready yet
• 12 September 2007: The Google Phone and the iPhone – both looking for software and spectrum
• 5 July 2004: San Diego Padres promote HDTV

Runners from the mainland, Japan and other countries are arriving on Oahu for the 2008 Honolulu Marathon, which starts this Sunday, 14 December with the usual fireworks.

(See the end of this billso.com article for updated information.)

Race officials have pledged that runners will get accurate finish times this year for the race’s ChampionChip system.As I discussed in my billso.com article of 8 March 2008 titled Honolulu Marathon limps to the finish line, the 2007 Honolulu Marathon was marred by heavy rains and other problems that took down the race’s ChronoTrack timing system.

I’m not running the Honolulu Marathon this year, as I’ve concentrated on shorter distances since I ran my sixth and final marathon in 2001. I’m not even running or walking the first 10 kilometers of the course as I did in 2005.

An orange D-tag attached to a runner's shoe

The 2007 edition became an unfortunate experiment with an RFID system that relied on fragile paper-based devices called D-tags that are printed onto a detachable portion of each runner’s race number. Many runners who did follow the instructions managed to break the tags while tucking the devices into their shoelaces. Each D-tag has an adhesive strip, as seen in this picture by dharmabumx. Some runners voided their D-tags by bending or folding the delicate components - even a single fold was enough to break the electronics inside the tag. Other runners failed to remove the D-tag from their race number and then attach the D-tag to their shoe.

Chronotrack posted this YouTube video called ChronoTrack D-Tag Instuctional [sic] on 21 March 2008 with English instructions on attaching a D-tag. It’s interesting that this video appeared after the Honolulu Marathon dropped ChronoTrack from the 2008 race.

Of course, another possible reason the D-tags failed in the 2007 Honolulu Marathon was that many race volunteers and Japanese tour group directors were not told or did not know how to remove and attach the fragile D-tags properly. Few of the runners and volunteers had ever seen a D-tag before, and the instructions and demonstrations provided at the race number pick-up site in the Honolulu Convention Center did not seem to help.

According to Honolulu Marathon officials, there were 21,945 entries earlier this week, and 13,676 or 62% are from Japan. It turns out that proper training before the marathon is just as important for the support staff as it is for the runners.

Click here to view the embedded video.

The 2008 Honolulu Marathon will use ChampionChip systems as they did prior to the 2007 race. Both the ChampionChip and ChronoTrack systems collect timing data from runners during the race. RFID readers are embedded in rubber mats that are laid across the course, usually near important splits like the half-marathon mark. When I run a race, I rely on my split time to help me check my progress against my pre-race plan. If I don’t have my own stopwatch, there’s almost always a race clock or announcer at the split that will have the race or gun time available.

RFID systems help facers record the runners actual time on the course, as there are mats at the starting and finish line. In a large race like the Honolulu Marathon, most runners will cross the starting line several minutes after the starting gun has fired. Runners can use the official chip time provided by the race to enter another race that limits entries to qualified runners. A verified chip time that is delivered within days of the race is quite valuable to serious runners. The 2007 Honolulu Marathon had to improvise a video review system to provide times to finishers months after the race ended.

All each runner has to do is make sure their chip is attached to their show and run across the mat. Most races that use these systems, including Honolulu’s other big running event, the Great Aloha Run, set up testing mats at the race number pick-up site so runners can check their chips and D-tags. When the mat detects a tag, a speaker beeps. In the testing setup, a computer and monitor are available, so runners can make sure their name and number appear in the system.

Why can’t I use my own chip?

Every chip-timed race that I’ve run in Hawaii has required me to rent a chip for the event. But I have my own ChampionChip that I purchased at the 2000 Chicago Marathon and have used at the 2001 Austin Marathon and other mainland races. My chip has its own serial number, and I can update my contact information on the ChampionChip web site when necessary.

billso's ChampionChip

I’ve never been able to use my own ChampionChip in Hawaii. I could ask the race organizers if I could use my own tag, but that’s not the point. The race entry forms in Hawaii don’t even have a field to add my tag number, and the Honolulu Marathon’s FAQ doesn’t address the issue at all.

ChampionChips and D-tags don’t have batteries because their RFID transmitters get power when the runner passes over a charged timing mat. This induction charging method, which relies upon small capacitors built into the chip or tag, provides enough electrical power to get a radio signal from the chip to mat’s RFID receptors. This is yet another reason that the chip or tag must be placed on the shoe, as close as possible to the mat.

The 2008 Honolulu Marathon is requiring participants to buy a commemorative ChampionChip that each runner can keep after the event. The chip cost is included in the race entry fee.

A hard rain’s gonna fall

Diesel generators are usually used to power the mats. In 2007, the generators failed when puddles formed by the heavy rains flooded the system. Here’s another YouTube video from ChronoTrack called ChronoTrack System Test - Water & Rain, and posted on 21 March 2008. The audio track includes several examples of the telltale beep that tells the runner a chip was detected. In practice, the beeps are useless at the start line, as too many runners are moving over the mats. The background noise in the audio is not thunder, just some light wind hitting the microphone.

Notice how the water in the “heavy rain test” is applied to the mat. There is no generator in the video, as the testers are using an extension cord from an AC electrical outlet. The D-tag in the video is immersed in water for a few seconds, but the power system is never tested. We’ve had light rain the this morning in Honolulu, and it’s likely to rain here on Sunday morning, too.

Click here to view the embedded video.

In the 2008 Honolulu Marathon, SportStats is using primary and backup systems with more durable generators at four split locations as well as the start and finish areas. I hope the generators will be placed on dry, covered platforms and not set in the gutter or on the ground. Split times will be available at the marathon’s web site:

• 10 kilometers (6.2 miles)
• half-marathon (13.1 miles)
• 30 kilometer (18.6 miles)
• 40 kilometer (24.8 miles)

See the Star-Bulletin’s article called Marathon perseveres in face of sour climate for more details. The Star-Bulletin’s article identifies the 2007 timing system as ChronoTrax.

Updated 14-Dec-08: It was raining when the starting gun and the fireworks went off at 5 am HT this morning. By 9 am, the rain had stopped in downtown Honolulu.

Updated 13-Dec-08: It’s rained most of the day here in downtown Honolulu.

Of course, we woke up to more rain this morning in downtown Honolulu, and an article from the Honolulu Advertiser called Honolulu Marathon returns to rain-proof timers after ‘07 fiasco. The article provides yet another name for the ChronoTrack system: SAI. Advertiser writer Michael Tsai, also reported that:

• The Honolulu Marathon spent 1200 to 1500 additional man-hours an $50,000 to recover the lost finishing times from the 2007 race
• The Honolulu Marathon sued ChronoTrack for $30,000 to recover those additional costs
• As we reported in this billso.com article on 8 March 2008, the 2007 Las Vegas and Philadelphia Marathons also had significant timing problems related to their ChronoTrack systems.

Updated 12-Dec-08: Here’s the local newspaper articles on yesterday’s storm. No rain during the day, but the rain resumed during the evening.

• Honolulu Star-Bulletin: Rain, pain to remain
• Honolulu Advertiser: Storm wallops Oahu

Updated 11-Dec-08: We’ve had heavy rains and winds all day long on Oahu. At times, the rain has been falling at the rate of 3 inches an hour. See the Honolulu Advertiser for more details. Kapiolani Park, which is the staging ground for the Honolulu Marathon’s finish, will be just as soaked as it was last year, even if it stops raining tonight.

The Star Bulletin has an excellent article in this morning’s edition called Volunteer army about the event’s 4500-member volunteer staff. I’m happy there are so many vounteers each year, but it’s important the volunteers have correct and up-to-date information. I’ve seen other races on the mainland where race volunteers sent runners in the wrong direction and making the course either too long or too short. The Honolulu Marathon is ranked 3rd in size behind the New York City and Chicago events among US marathons.

There’s also an editorial in the same edition called Solid reputation keeps Honolulu Marathon in the running. It reads more like a civic pride piece, although the Star-Bulletin does acknowledge the massive problems of the 2007 Honolulu Marathon.

Images courtesy of dharmabumx and McBadger on Flickr through their Creative Commons licenses.

Related articles and pages on billso.com

• 8 March 2008: Honolulu Marathon limps to the finish line
• 16 April 2008: New reader can track several RFID tags at once

Earlier today, Hawaii’s biggest and oldest ILEC, Hawaiian Telcom, filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy in Federal court. The move was widely expected after HawTel and its owner, the Carlyle Group, ran into trouble paying its creditors and bondholders. Carlyle owes over US$1 billion in debt that financed their 2005 acquisition of HawTel. 

Click here to view the embedded video.

The company’s half-a-million local subscribers won’t see any immediate changes in their service. In the long term, HawTel may need to restructure its union contracts, and shed or reconfigure its business units. The state Public Utility Commission has to approve these changes before they can take effect, so this bankruptcy may last longer than the largest previous bankruptcy in the state, which was done by Hawaiian Airlines in 2003.

IPTV to the rescue?

The company’s struggling IPTV business unit is one area of concern. HawTel needs a competitive television service to lock in its current residential landline customers. However, the company has delayed its plans for IPTV deployment over the last 3 years. This has given Time Warner an unprecedented opportunity to “skim the cream” and take HawTel’s best customers by offering VoIP, television and broadband Internet service packages. Once these customers leave Hawaiian Telcom, they’re unlikely to return.  

Watch my YouTube video or see the same clip on Vimeo for more of my comments, and see the Honolulu Advertiser’s article, HawTel files bankruptcy, and the Star-Bulletin’s Monday update titled HawTel files for bankruptcy protection for more information.

Updated 2 December 2008: Here’s some good articles about the filing from other blogs and news sources:

• Honolulu Advertiser: HawTel’s efforts to compete hindered by rising debt load
• Honolulu Star-Bulletin: HawTel seeks bankruptcy protection
• bytemarks.org: Hawaiian Telcom files chapter 11

Related articles and pages on billso.com

• Hawaiian Telcom
• 25 July 2008: Fixing the DNS security hole with OpenDNS
• 22 February 2008: Customer lock-in
• 5 February 2008: HawTel replaces CEO with turnaround specialist
• 18 August 2007: HawTel to offer naked DSL and faster downloads
• 11 June 2007: HECO tests smart electric meters
• 7 June 2007: PC Magazine: HawTel, Time Warner Oceanic provide slow Internet connections
• 27 April 2007: IT services are ripe for acquisition
• 21 March 2007: About e-commerce 3: The broadband connection
• 16 November 2006: HawTel claims that system problems are consultants’ fault

As I’ve mentioned in other billso.com articles, I’ve used Gmail for a few years. My first account started with a gigabyte of free storage. Every now and then, Google adds to my storage quota without charging me a penny. 

Two weeks ago, Gmail added video chat to its services. In short, Google video chat works very well in Gmail. Just install a small Google program. The additional setup is minimal. Mailplane, a customized Mac web browser that supports multiple Gmail accounts, also supports the video chat feature.

David Carr wrote a brief article for today’s New York Times called Google Seduces with Utility. Carr also likes the easy setup, and the price is hard to beat: it’s free.

I don’t mind customer lock-in when the services and products work well.

See Google’s blog post, Say hello to Gmail voice and video chat, for more details. 

Related pages and articles on billso.com and other sites

• Email and spam
• 9 July 2008: Is email in danger from microblogging?
• 1 July 2008: Mailplane - A Mac Browser for Gmail
• 22 February 2008: Customer lock-in

Honolulu city council member Charles Djou has proposed a bill that would ban text messaging and video gameplay while driving. See the Honolulu Star-Bulletin article, No driving and texting, and the Honolulu Advertiser’s article, Honolulu City Council considers ban on texting while driving, for more information.

Man driving and talking on his mobile

A few of the comments on these articles suggested that police officers would encounter problems enforcing a text messaging ban. It’s unlikely that a driver will be pulled over for texting, especially if there is no state or Federal law on the books. A city law would be enforced on city streets.

It’s much more likely that these laws will be used to file additional charges related to a traffic or pedestrian accident.

Every mobile phone carrier also keeps a record of the time, date and content of each text message. The carrier’s logs may also note the cell phone tower that received the text message. That information is enough to link the message and the device to a specific time and location.

Carriers still include on the monthly invoice a time/date stamp and phone number for every text message. All the police have to do is subpoena the accused’s mobile phone carrier for these records.

It’s easy enough to spot someone who is text messaging. They’re hunched over their phone. Video game usage isn’t tracked by mobile phone towers if the device has no radio, but officers and eyewitnesses can still testify that they saw a distracted driver using a device.

When I lived in Florida, there was a state law that banned headphone use by drivers. This was in the early 1980s, when Walkmen tape players and radios were popular.

When I’m walking, I try to count the number of drivers who are wearing earbuds or headphones. I see too many people who drive with their ears covered, especially on scooters and mopeds. It’s amazing how little common sense some people have.

Image courtesy of bradleygee on Flickr through a Creative Commons license.

I love Gmail. I like its clean, elegant user interface. 

Today, Gmail rolled out themes, so users can make their Gmail screen look as ugly as they’d like. The ASCII theme is nice enough. Green text on a black screen reminds me of PINE.

See Spice up your inbox with colors and themes on Gmail’s official blog for more details.

The November 2008 issue of Hawaii Business magazine has a cover story called How Wez Made Millionz Wit Dis Foto, on icanhaszheezburger.com and the site’s cofounders Kari Unebasami and Eric Nakagawa. The article coincides with the publication of their web site’s first book, I Can Has Cheezburger?: A LOLcat Colleckshun. The book contains 200 pictures selected from the site’s collection of captioned photos.

Kari used to work at Hawaii Business magazine’s parent company, Pacific Basin Communications, so the cover story is the usual “locals make good” puff piece that is a staple for Honolulu publications.

There’s no discussion of the intellectual property issues involved in licensing and publishing these photographs. I heard Eric briefly mention this issue at the Manoa Geeks on 1 August 2008, and I’d wondered if the publisher wanted photographs that were the sole property of the site.

LOLcat asks about timely response to a legal request

That would have been an interesting discussion, especially since icanhascheezburger.com has a copyright tips page that advises users to post pictures they took themselves. Many of the images on icanhascheezburger’s companion site PunditKitchen.com are captioned versions of news service photos. The sites’ terms of use page includes the standard DMCA notice, but also assigns copyright for every image that users contribute to the site to Pet Holdings.

It makes me wonder what Reuters, Corbis and the Associated Press might say regarding the fair use of their photos by these web sites. I’m not a lawyer, but I am curious what Larry Lessig or other Creative Commons advocates would say about this.

Last week, Pet Holdings released an iPhone app that lets users browser through the sites’ recent images. Upcoming versions will let iPhone users submit their own captioned photos to the sites. For other mobile phones, there’s icanlol.com/iphone/. See iPhone App for taking Cheezburgers To Go for more details.

Barack who?

When I saw the magazine on the newstand, my first reaction was “Why isn’t Barack Obama on the cover?” It is the November 2008 issue, and the Honolulu’s most famous high school graduate. Kari and Eric have a great story to tell, but wouldn’t Obama’s picture on the cover sell more copies? Sure, it’s a bit of a gamble to put a presidential candidate’s picture on a monthly magazine during Election Day, but the potential benefits and revenue seem to outweigh the risks.

Then again, the cat book was published in October 2008, so the article is more of a promotional piece than anything else. There is some discussion of Kari and Eric’s roles as entrepreneurs, but Kari admits that she and Eric got lucky with a well-timed idea:

“It was for fun,” says Unebasami. “Then it got popular and we had to adjust to that.”

The Hawaii Business article also mentions that Kari and Eric sold their site to Pet Holdings, a company owned by Ben Huh, for an “undisclosed sum”. The article does list Time Magazine’s estimate of US$2 million as the sale price. I found Time magazine’s article, The Master of Memes, in the reference list for Wikipedia’s article about icanhascheezburger.com. That explains the title of the Hawaii Business magazine article. Two million pre-tax dollars meets the minimum copywriting definition of “millions”. 

What about 4chan?

Still, it’s a surprise that the Hawaii Business article doesn’t mention 4chan at all. It’s almost as if that Lev Grossman never wrote that article for Time. Grossman’s article isn’t about Eric, Kari or Ben at all. It’s about a man called Christoper Poole, better known as moot, and his web site, 4chan. 4chan is an image board where users post and comment on pictures. Some 4chan members believe the LOLcat meme, including the catchphrases Caturday and “Do not want!” began on 4chan’s boards, and that icanhascheezburger.com is profiting from the meme. Wikipedia’s article on 4chan has some additional background.

Instead, Hawaii Business writers Jolyn Okimoto Rosa and Scott Radway report the following story behind Kari’s relative anonymity:

[icanhascheezburger.com] started as a lark and Unebasami wasn’t sure she wanted to be known as one of the founders of that quirky cat Web site. So she asked for anonymity.

As I pointed out in my billso.com article of 26 April 2008, Honolulu LOLcats founder Kari Unebasami reveals herself, Kari had claimed that she maintained her anonymity because of rude email messages and perceived threats from unidentified 4chan members.

Thus, articles such as BusinessWeek’s piece from 13 July 2007 called Bloggers Bring in the Big Bucks don’t mention Kari by her real name. She’s just called tofuburger in these articles.

It’s a bit hard to keep all of these stories straight, especially since the home page of Ben Huh’s blog lists his wife as tofuburger.

Images appear courtesy of lawgeek and J.G.L. on flickr through a Creative Commons license.

The about box from Ben Huh's blog

Related articles and pages on billso.com

• Copyright and fair use
• Creative Commons
• 1 August 2008: Last night’s Manoa Geeks meeting
• 15 June 2008: The Associated Press and fair use on the Web
• 26 April 2008: Honolulu LOLcats founder Kari Unebasami reveals herself

I’m using two new textbooks for my IS 6700 Technology Strategy course this spring: one of these books is IT Strategy in Action by Jim McKeen and Heather Smith.

I’ve also compiled a custom collection of technology readings and cases for the course. This collection is not available on Amazon.com or in other bookstores.

Many of the assignments will rely on these cases, so students in the course need to buy both books.

The textbook I have been using, Strategic Dynamics by Bob Burgelman and Andrew Grove, is a great book. But it is time to make a change. Of course, students should not try to use the Burgelman book in the Spring 2009 course.

These two volumes will be sold as a shrink-wrapped bundle in the HPU Bookstore. The bundle will be available in January 2009. This bundle is less expensive than bound versions of the books, and it’s punched for a three-ring binder.

There’s a preliminary syllabus and schedule for this course at the billso.com page for this course, IS 6700 Spring 2009. If you have questions, contact me via email.

I’m testing a few new features here on billso.com, as I recover from a brief service outage earlier this week.

I’ve added ShareThis to almost every page and post on this site. It’s a drop down menu that lets users share the related article or page to one of three dozen social media services. Email sharing is supported, as well as popular social networks like MySpace and Facebook.

OpenID logins are supported as always, but some of these users may need to login before they write and submit their comments. If you encounter problems with this feature, let me know.

My talk on blogging your career is scheduled for 1:15 PM today in Hawaii Convention Center room 304B.

I have posted some slides in Google Docs for my talk this afternoon at PodCamp Hawaii.

Related articles and pages on billso.com

• About billso
• My books
• My graduate classes at Hawaii Pacific University
• 9 October 2008: I’m speaking at WordCamp Hawaii
• 1 August 2008: Last night’s Manoa Geeks meeting
• 31 January 2007: Competitive advantage and key success factors

There’s a new version of the WP-OpenID plugin available. Version 3.0 includes some new features, but it is not compatible with WordPress plugins that intercept HTTP POST requests, including the following list. If you rely upon these plugins, then don’t try to install OpenID support.

• Bad Behavior
• Defensio

This new OpenID plugin also requires some changes for sites that use the JanRain ID Selector. I posted some code on 30 April 2008 in a billso.com article called Updating WP-OpenID to support ID Selector.

The code updated the OpenID plugin to accommodate this ID Selector feature, which displays an attractive dropbox of OpenID providers in the main WordPress login box. This code won’t change the comment form at all.

Here’s the updated code, which is almost identical to my earlier work. Version 3 of the OpenID plugin shifted the login_form function to a new file, so upgrading the OpenID plugin will overwrite any previous changes that we made.

The code below should be placed inside function openid_wp_login_form() in the wp-login.php script, and should be uploaded to the OpenID plugin directory. The keyword “hex” should be replaced with the long hexadecimal string embedded in the ID Selector script that you must generate at idselector.com

I’ve been spending much less time on billso.com and more time wrestling with WebCT during the last 6 weeks, as I’m teaching two additional classes this fall.

Up until August 2008, I was posting at least one article a day on billso.com.

I don’t think I have blogger burnout, but it has been a challenge to juggle all of my current projects.

At this point, I’m barely checking into my Friendfeed and Twitter pages.

My teaching schedule will calm down after December, so I will be spending more time on billso.com by then.

I am officially on the speaking schedule for WordCamp Hawaii on Saturday, 24 October 2008.

See Wordcamp Speaker: Bill Sodeman for the announcement of my talk entitled How to Blog Your Career Without Breaking Your Budgets.

I’ll talk about how I’ve used WordPress to help me document and record my teaching, writing and social media activities.

It will be a 30-minute talk, with a few demonstrations, an nice set of slides and plenty of time to talk story with attendees.

Budgets?

Yes, I did mean to use the word “budgets”. People have a financial budget, and they also have a time budget or schedule, too.

It makes sense for faculty members should keep track of their activities, but that can be a challenge. Faculty tend to work on their own, without much or any administrative support. It’s a lot like being an entrepreneur, without the thrills of elevator pitches and business plans.

I have a renewable contract at HPU, which means that every 5 years I must ask the university to renew my contract. We don’t have tenure at Hawaii Pacific University, but in early 2011, I can request a promotion to full professor.

Both the reappointment and promotion processes require me to produce a large, well-organized binder with statements of my activities, and plenty of supporting evidence.

I’ll also discuss how entrepreneurs, students, and other people can use the techniques I’ve developed in WordPress to help their own careers and professional goals.

Many thanks to Roxanne Darling and Judi Clark for all their work on WordCamp Hawaii.

The latest patch for Mac OS X finally closes a major hole in the operating system’s DNS (domain name system) software. Apple’s description is in this knowledge base article (About the security content of Mac OS X v10.5.5 and Security Update 2008-006 ).

Of course, Apple is late to the party. By early July 2008, Microsoft had a Windows patch ready for distribution, and the major *NIX systems had their own patches ready. This Cnet article called Massive, coordinated DNS patch released has more information about this project, which preceded the public announcements about the flaw.

It’s sad that Dan Kaminsky’s warnings, detailed in a 24 July 2008 Cnet article called Kaminsky (finally) provides DNS flaw details, did not inspire an urgent response form Cupertino. Apple’s July 2008 patch addressed DNS server issues, but left most Mac users without a fix.

There are still other ways to redirect a computer to a bad domain name, of course. Another piece of prevention involves using OpenDNS instead of your ISP’s domain name servers. OpenDNS is free, fast, and provides spellchecking and phishing protection that is better than most PC and Mac security software.

See these articles from the New York Times (Apple Update Finally Fixes Important DNS Bug ) and ComputerWorld (Apple releases Mac OS X 10.5.5, patches nearly 70 bugs) for more details.

Related posts and pages on billso.com

• OpenDNS
• Hawaiian Telcom
• 25 July 2008: Fixing the DNS security hole
• 24 February 2008: Pakistan blocks YouTube, breaks trust
• 15 January 2008: OpenDNS update
• 3 September 2007: When users block the ads, should web sites block the users?
• 13 July 2007: Speed up your broadband connection with OpenDNS

Talk Like a Pirate Day is one of my favorite holidays. It’s also a a good chance to show off 12seconds.tv, a microblogging website that lets users record and post very short videos, kind of like a video Twitter. The service is still undergoing some testing, hence my 5-second video.

They want some pirate-themed content to celebrate (Talk Like A Pirate Day on 12seconds - Friday Sept. 19).

Talk Like a Pirate Day on 12seconds.tv

Hewlett-Packard has announced that the company will eliminate almost 8% of the company’s global workforce. The New York Times (Hewlett-Packard Cuts 25,000 Jobs After E.D.S. Purchase) and Associated Press (HP surprises Wall Street with size of EDS job cuts) have two good articles about the move.

No word on what this means for recently-acquired EDS, the primary vendor for Oahu’s most famous outsourced IT project, the Navy-Marine Corps Intranet (NMCI). The restructuring plan is necessary, given the US$13.9 billion price HP paid for EDS.

I noticed three uniformed HPD officers at the Hotel and Fort Street crosswalk a few minutes ago. Two had Segways, and one was on a bike.

I overheard one saying that they are giving out warnings to pedestrians who crossed against the light. Education is always good, especially with a few thousand new pedestrians on the Mall. Hotel Street is a transit road, and there’s at least one bus rolling through every few minutes.

Image courtesy of GeishaBot through a Creative Commons license.

Related posts on billso.com

• 3 August 2008: Welcome to the crosswalk
• 13 July 2008: My sidewalk nightmare
• 6 June 2008: Can the blind hear hybrid cars?

During the last month, I’ve watched faculty and staff moving great quantities of furniture between classrooms and offices. It’s a summer ritual at HPU.

We work and live on an island, so shipping pre-assembled furniture to our campus can be expensive.

There are several sites with interesting collections of economical yet attractive flat pack furniture. These designs are much easier to ship to Hawaii in bulk than comparable pre-assembled furniture.

Here’s two YouTube videos with some interesting ideas in flat pack furniture.

• Treehugger Picks: Flat pack Furniture
• More Creative Furniture for Cramped Urban Living: 20 Pieces of Ingenious ‘Flat Pack’ Furniture

Here’s are 2 cardboard classroom desks that were designed by students at the Rhode Island School of Design. The specific dimensions of this cardboard chair, complete with a functional desk, are available at the YouTube page for the first video called Amazing Cardboard Chair Design Unfolding RISD.

Click here to view the embedded video.

Click here to view the embedded video.

This next video shows the assembly process for a Legare desk, available from SimonHelene.com. The components are manufactured at the company’s factory in New York state, and can easily be shipped in a flat pack. Putting the desk together is much easier than the flat pack kits sold at many big box stores.

Click here to view the embedded video.

The fall semester starts today at HPU. I’m teaching 2 sections of a freshman course this morning, and my graduate course on Technology Strategy this evening.

I also have online sections of Technology Strategy and Information Systems Management.

I’m using WebCT as my learning management system (LMS) this semester. I’m teaching five sections this term, so I’m cutting back on my blogging.

My students should log in to Campus Pipeline, go to the My Courses tab, and click on the appropriate course link to open WebCT.

During the semester, I will assign articles, videos and links from billso.com as readings in my graduate courses. If WebCT or Campus Pipeline go offline for a day or more, I’ll place announcements on billso.com.

Just a reminder for my HPU students: WebCT is down for maintenance until 1200 HT tomorrow, Thursday, 28 August 2008 1800 HT this evening.

I’ve posted the syllabi and schedules for my graduate courses on the following pages:

• IS 6100
• IS 6700
• MGMT 6050

Image courtesy of 4PIZON through a Creative Commons license.

I’ve posted my Fall 2008 syllabus for Information Systems Management, also known as IS 6100 and MGMT 6050 at Hawaii Pacific University. This is an online course that starts next Tuesday, 2 September 2008.

The document is available here and in WebCT as a PDF file.

I’m using WebCT to manage the course.

We’re using a new textbook this term, too.

Congratulations to the Shidler College of Business, part of the University of Hawaii at Manoa.

The Shidler College was ranked 19th out of all AACSB-accredited programs in a recent survey of international business programs, based on responses from deans and faculty at AACSB-accredited programs.

See this article in the Honolulu Advertiser called UH business school ranked internationally for additional details.

As we start the university school year in North America, more students are buying and using Macs and iPhones. In a few cases, universities are giving freshman students Apple hardware. 9to5mac has an excellent article on this trend called iPhone takes a seat across university campuses. Jonathan D. Glater also discussed university Mac adoption in his New York Times article called Welcome Freshman. Have an iPod. 

With the high cost of gas, fewer students are driving themselves to campus.

Will fewer students be tempted to use their iPhones and iPod Touches as heads-up video displays in their automobiles, as shown in jiggymatt’s YouTube video called “Heads Up” iPhone Display and discussed in a bookofjoe article called ‘It’s great - I can watch my stuff while I’m driving’?

If you’re dumb enough to watch videos while you’re driving, you probably shouldn’t be going to college.

Click here to view the embedded video.

Related articles and pages on billso.com

• iPhone
• 19 August 2008: Teaching college students online
• 16 August 2008: Divided attention and food in the classroom
• 14 July 2008: Rising gas prices fuel online course enrollments

I started teaching online courses at my university back in January 2005. This morning’s Honolulu Star-Bulletin features an article about Honolulu universities and their online programs - see Online classes on the rise. As I pointed out in my billso.com articles of 14 July 2008 called Rising gas prices fuel online course enrollments, students are willing to take an online course to save time and money.

I’ve used several different systems to manage these courses:

• Moodle, which I used in the spring of 2005, is an free open source system. It has some good features, including extensive use of RSS feeds. However, the Moodle software has always been a work in progress, so some of its features seem flaky and unstable.
• TurnItIn.com actually has an excellent gradebook system included in the service. I’ve been using that system for the last 3 years. My students seem to prefer this gradebook, but a handful of students have commented that they’d rather use WebCT.

But I haven’t used WebCT as my primary CMS (course management system) for an online course. I’m going to give WebCT another try this fall. Perhaps it has improved after 3 years.

Related articles on billso.com

• 14 July 2008: Rising gas prices fuel online course enrollments
• 27 August 2007: It’s TurnItIn.com, not WebCT, for my Fall 2007 students
• 20 July 2007: Spring 2007 course files have been archived
• 4 May 2007: WebCT and TurnItIn.com are running slowly
• 7 February 2007: TurnItIn.com discussion forums vs blog comments
• 25 January 2007: Why so many web sites?
• 10 October 2006: Why so many popup windows?

I’m writing my fall course schedules and setting up some WebCT sites this week, so I really am going to take a small break from my billso.com blogging.

I’ll post some fresh content during the next week or two! It just won’t be an every day thing.

I haven’t been watching the Beijing Olympics. It seems that the Chinese government cannot understand marketing or public relations. Fake fireworks, lip-synced anthems, crowds bussed in to fill seats at “sold out” events… it’s a big stretch to say that these Olympics are the “best ever”.

Michael Sheridan’s article in the London Times called China’s iron Olympic grip starts to slip is a good summary of the problems China’s government has created for itself.

I teach graduate courses on information systems. This fall, I’m teaching two undergraduate sections of an entry-level computer science course about Microsoft Office.

I’ve been polishing up my syllabus, and writing a very short policy about Internet use in the classroom. Cara Finnegan, an associate professor of communications at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, describes student usage of email, the web and mobile phones during class time as a problem of divided attention, and posted this policy in an article on her blog entitled The syllabus it is a-changing:

“If you aren’t using it to perform a task specifically related to what we are doing in class at that very moment, put it away.”

It’s an excellent policy. Classroom time is limited, and students need to pay attention to what is happening. At the same time, instructors should plan an interesting and engaging series of activities for each class meeting. A well-planned session will help reduce the temptation for students to whip out their cell phone or check their email.

In the past, I’ve reminded students that the classroom computers and the wireless networks are monitored by university IT staff. It’s a good point of discussion when the class is studying network security or phishing. But more students are coming to class with mobile data cards in their laptops, or smartphones that use the mobile phone network. An Internet “kill switch” on the instructor’s podium might control the classroom’s connection to the university network, but they won’t disrupt a wireless connection.

It’s a classroom, not a lunchroom

Students often complain about arbitrary rules and inconvenient procedures. These rules have a variety of purposes, but they do help us identify students who can’t or won’t follow instructions.

I continue to include eating in my policy, especially when my courses meet in the Frear Center. My university has posted a strict no eating and drinking policy in that building for the last 6 years, but many instructors and students outside my college choose to ignore the rule.

I’ve heard a wide variety of stories and excuses. Some students have claimed they have never encountered a similar rule at their other schools. That might be true, but I’ve seen “no food and beverage in the classroom” policies at every university that I’ve worked at or attended.

At times, I’ve seen students smuggle in food and then lie about what they had done. Lying to a security guard seems like a poor idea, especially when the guards are supposed to keep homeless people and lost tourists out of the classroom building.

Students who bring in their own food usually don’t consider that their classmates or instructor might be allergic to an ingredient in the food. I’ve often wondered what would happen if a teacher had to cancel an in-class exam because they were allergic to peanuts.

My university has relied upon instructors to remind students about these policies. It boggles my mind when some students fail to understand that these same instructors might be grading their assignments and exams.

I do my best to be courteous when I remind students about these policies. I have less patience for my fellow faculty members who ignore these policies  or encourage students to flaunt the rules.

Other readings

Finnegan cites a New York Times article as an inspiration for her policy. The closest article was published on 23 March 2008 and called The tension builds (It’s almost Monday) - not the 25th as Finnegan claims in her post. That article discusses the digital leash that employees willing wear during the weekend as they cheek their work-related email and messages.

Delaney Kirk briefly discussed Finnegan’s article in a post called Put Your Policy On Texting, Emailing, Or Surfing During Class On Your Syllabus.

Related articles on billso.com

• 14 July 2008: Rising gas prices fuel online course enrollments
• 12 June 2008: Do kids and students need cell phones?
• 6 January 2008: What are we learning?
• 27 May 2007: Cell phones and instructors

I’m back in Honolulu after my conference, and I am catching up with my social media sites today. Some of the sites have reasonable mobile versions, so I was able to post updates and stay current through my phone or my iPod’s WiFi connection:

• Facebook
• Plurk
• FriendFeed
• Twitter

At least one of my sites offer mobile versions with very limited feature sets:

• LinkedIn offers a contact list. On an iPod Touch, it’s a little clumsy to use. Other than that, there’s hardly any useful content available. 

I’ve spent a week in Orange County without a car. It was a nice change of pace. Anaheim is walkable, at least around the Anaheim Convention Center and Downtown Disney.

Yesterday I was doing some grading while I was at my conference. I set up my MacBook Pro on a comfortable and prominent site - an unused registration kiosk by some conference rooms. It was also convenient to the free conference WiFi, which is a bit more reliable than that darned hotel WiFi signal. I recorded my first video blog posts while I was sitting in that seat.

Within 2 hours, I had met 8 Mac users who just wanted to chat. While more management professors use Windows than Macs, Two asked for help accessing the WiFi signal.

Once again, a triumph in friendly end user support, courtesy of your humble Herr Doktor Professor Sodeman.

I recorded these two videos a few minutes ago on my Mac’s built-in iSight camera. The second video is my comment about the brief Gmail outage an hour ago.  

The good news and the bad news on 12seconds.tv

I’ve seen only 4 Macs at the 2008 Academy of Management conference. There’s free WiFi in the conference lobbies, and I’ve been using it to check my EMBA course and grade the final assignments.

The vast majority of these management professors and doctoral students use Windows laptops, Outlook and Microsoft Office as they study their papers and PowerPoint slides one last time before their sessions. 

I helped one of these users connect to the conference’s free wireless network. It’s just another day of ad hoc user support for Bill Sodeman, professor and CIO.

If I get more questions, I may set out a tip jar.

In the meantime, it’s fun to watch the parade of growl notifications that Little Snitch displays on my Mac.

Last Thursday I said that I’m taking a break from blogging during my conference in Anaheim this week.

Instead, I’ve been posting a rant or article each day since then. 

Will someone tell me when my intervention is scheduled? I’ll block out some time on my calendar.

The convention center has free WiFi, but I need a break before dinner. I just spent 20 minutes finding a sweet spot for my hotel’s WiFi.

My room is behind a corner, so I moved the desk 3 feet towards the window and put a phone book under my computer.

That was enough to get a better view of the nearest access point. 

Yes, I could sit in the hotel lobby like the other conference participants have done, or continue my vigil in the convention center, but I have my geek reputation to uphold… and I don’t have a cellular data card any more. 

Image courtesy of billso through a Creative Commons License.

I’m flying to Anaheim this evening for the annual Academy of Management conference, along with 10,000 other management professors.

I’ll resume my daily blog posts on Monday, 18 August 2008. It’s not like there’s a daily quota or anything… although I’ve been posting an article a day for a while now. (See Relax, Bloggers: Nobody Is Keeping Score, and There’s No Quota.)

In the meantime, I’ll be on email, Facebook, FriendFeed and my other haunts.

Click here to view the embedded video.

Google has announced that there are over 1 million users for the education version of Google Apps. this doesn’t surprise me at all, as Google is offering very low per seat pricing on these contracts.

It’s always been difficult for universities to manage their email and messaging systems. Email is the lowest common denominator for Internet users, which is one reason why phishers, scammers and crackers target email users. Everyone on the Internet has at least one email account.

University users have adopted social media en masse as an alternative to email. But that doesn’t mean that email is not important. It’s still mission critical for universities.

See this announcement, Back to school with over 1 million users worldwide, for a list of universities and schools that are adopting Google’s enterprise cloud computing solutions.

Related articles and pages on billso.com

• 9 July 2008: Is email in danger from microblogging?
• 12 May 2008: Software and services - free or paid?
• 22 April 2008: It’s 2008 and email is still broken
• 11 April 2007: Google wants to hear about your university email service
• 23 February 2007: Google Apps vs Microsoft Office
• 7 December 2006: Spam is back with a vengeance
• 22 August 2006: 95 percent of all e-mail is UCE
• 4 August 2004: E-mail is broken

I wish I’d seen Trevor Yee’s excellent article called Why HPT Lanes Won’t Work in Honolulu before I wrote my previous billso.com article on the proposed rail system. Trevor raises several good points about toll lanes. These lanes are much larger than a fixed guideway, and they depend upon toll revenue. I am seeing fewer cars on Honolulu’s roads these days, even as the school year gets underway.

Doug Carlson also had some good points in his recent post called The Closer Rail Gets, the More “Way Out” the Alternatives Are; a Sea Tunnel Around Oahu?! Doug takes on the foolish notion that a tunnel could be built in the Pacific Ocean. Environmentalists, the US Department of Defense, and a host of other groups would block an Oahu tunnel or causeway proposal if taxpayers didn’t scream about the costs.

Carlson also mentions a Honolulu Star-Bulletin commentary in which Hans Rosendal suggested that electric vehicles might make a good alternative to rail and traditional automobiles. If gas prices continue to rise, such vehicles may be the only practical alternative for people who want to drive a car to Honolulu from the Windward side of the island. I’m just not sure an all-electric vehicle could make it over the mountains. See the Star-Bulletin article called Transit Matters: Electric Vehicles for more details.

Yesterday morning, I saw Honolulu mayoral candidate/UH-Manoa professor/rail opponent Panos Prevedouros on the corner of the Pali Highway and Vineyard Boulevard. He was out there holding his sign and waving by himself. I heard two honks within 5 minutes, which was surprising. That intersection gets a lot of automobile and bus traffic from Kailua and Kaneohe every weekday morning. I thought there were more Panos supporters out there, but perhaps they’ve switched to Ann Kobayashi’s camp.

Recent articles and pages on billso.com

• Honolulu mass transit
• 27 July 2008: Have the wheels come off the bus and rail in Honolulu?
• 23 July 2008: The 100 mpg solar Prius
• 12 July 2008: My sidewalk nightmare
• 8 June 2008: Why Honolulu needs rail
• 6 June 2008: Can the blind hear hybrid cars?
• 20 April 2008: Honolulu newspapers to City Council: Enough already!
• 17 April 2008: Back on track
• 15 April 2008: City council members discuss mass transit research
• 2 April 2008: Still on track?
• 20 March 2008: Like a fifth wheel
• 2 July 2007: Parking in Chinatown is getting harder
• 21 June 2008: Mayor: state could pay for airport mass transit line
• 19 June 2007: City council, planners still arguing over mass transit routes, modes
• 15 June 2007: Telecommuting isn’t a free solution for Honolulu’s traffic woes

I enjoyed watching Randy Pausch’s lecture on Time Management. It’s 87 minutes long, so start at the 12 minute mark to get to the actual lecture. Slides are available here.

I found this set of documents on Lifehacker, in an article called Randy Pausch’s Time Management Tricks. The Lifehacker link came through an article called Pausch’s time management tips on Sandee Oshiro’s excellent blog, Hawaii Hacks. This is one of the better blogs that I’ve seen from the Honolulu Advertiser, and I hope she posts more articles like this!

When you know your time is limited, time management should become a major priority. I doesn’t matter how you track your time… although using LEGO bricks to track tasks would make work seem more like play, I think. This tutorial called On LEGO Powered Time-Tracking; My Daily Column has details. I also found it on Lifehacker in this article called Time tracker: Track Your Time with LEGO Bricks.

Click here to view the embedded video.

More people are walking into downtown Honolulu these days. I’m seeing more bicycles, mopeds, scooters and motorcycles, too.

Seattle has started closing streets to cars, to help protect pedestrians (see Seattle Starts Car-Free Closures).

In most American cities, the car rules supreme, at least until Google reinvents the electric car (see Google Moves to Reinvent Transportation).

In the interest of public safety, we present the following two articles. Read and learn.

Memo To: New pedestrians, In re: Your skills provides a long and handy primer to basic pedestrian and mass transit etiquette and safety with tips like these:

• The crosswalk will not protect you from cars.
• Get a bus pass or have your change ready as your board.
• Try not to bump other people with that big rolling bag or backpack as you…
• Move to the back of the bus. Please, move to the back of the bus.

NY State Sen. Carl Kruger proposes ban on handheld devices addresses a new social problem: the distracted pedestrian.

• Don’t send text messages while you walk.
• Turn down the volume on your iPod so you can hear the traffic. Oh, I said, “TURN DOWN THE…”

Image courtesy of woesis through a Creative Commons license.

Related articles and pages on billso.com

• Honolulu mass transit
• 28 June 2008: Google wants Georgia to get some exercise
• 12 June 2008: Do kids and students need cell phones?
• 19 March 2008: Running around

“What would be the harm in doing away with the S.A.T.?”

Kim Fassler, who writes the Quarterlife Cafe blog for the Honolulu Advertiser, posted an article on July 10th called Demise of the Evil S.A.T.? in which she asked and answered that question. A few colleges are making the SAT optional for undergraduate applicants, including Wake Forest. See this New York Times blog post called The Growing Backlash Against the SAT. 

Day 23 - exam hall courtesy of jackhynes on Flickr

Speaking as a faculty member, we need standardized testing in the admissions process. It’s difficult to compare high school GPAs, as they can vary widely or similar students, even within a school district.

Standardized tests like the SAT can help students who perform better on an exam than they do in the classroom. The SAT is only one factor in most admissions decisions, after all. 

Kim also mentioned another major reason for standardized testing. It is a sieve in the admissions process. Without standardized tests, university admissions officers might be flooded with applications from marginal students who are willing to pay their application fee and take their chances.   

It’s not supposed to be easy to get into a university.Student should comepte for a spot, because they’ll be competing to enter specific programs and graduate with their degree.

Back in 2000, I wrote a letter to the editor of the New York Times about high school graduation requirements, which were very strict 100 years ago. See my published letter called Standardized Students: Protesting a Test.  

We need graduate admissions exams, too

Kim hasn’t delivered on her promised column about the GRE, but most of what I’ve written above applies to graduate and professional school entrance exams, including the GMAT, LSAT and MCAT. It’s interesting that the GMAT will try a biometric identification method in 450 VUE testing centers in South Korea and India. I’m assuming that cheating has been an issue for the GMAT in those countries.

Image courtesy of sonicbloom on flickr

The GMAT exam is used in the MBA admissions process at many universities, and has a more focused approach than the GRE. I took it myself in October 1985. Of course, the exam didn’t cost US$250 back then. 

This Wall Street Journal article by John Hechinger called Business Schools Try Palm Scans To Finger Cheats has more details and a good graphic of palm vein scanning, which captures more data than a fingerprint scan.

The SAT doesn’t use biometrics yet, probably because there are many more test-takers each year than for the graduate exams. ETS claims that the cheating rate on the SAT is 0.1%, which seems like an underestimate to me.

The LSAT uses paper copies of fingerprints, which are discarded after 5 years. 

Images courtesy of jackhynes and sonicbloom through a Creative Commons license.

Related articles on billso.com

• 2 July 2008: ScoreTop.com cheating scandal affects GMAT exam scores and MBA students

As I mentioned yesterday here on billso.com, there was a Manoa Geeks meeting last night at the HMSA building. It was a big turnout - they ran out of seats and pizza!

PodCamp Hawaii was mentioned several times. I’ll be at that event on 24 and 25 October 2008, mostly in the WordCamp track.

Here’s a video interview that Burt Lum shot with his mobile phone and uploaded immediately afterwards to the Web. He’s talking with Jamie Hatch, and I pop up a bit later in the video.

Ryan Ozawa, one of our better-known bloggers on Oahu, invited me to this month’s Manoa Geeks meeting, which will be held at the HMSA building in Honolulu tonight. Details are available here.

This year I’ve set up some landing pages for my social networking services:

• A Facebook page with an expanded badge that lists my recent blog articles, and a list of my posts about Facebook
• A FriendFeed page that lists my activity on that service and several other social networking services. I have discovered FriendFeed groups on Facebook and LinkedIn, too.
• A LinkedIn page with my profile badge and my articles about LinkedIn, the most popular of all the professional social networks right now.

Rajat and Jayant Aggarwalla have blocked access to their Scrabulous Facebook app for US and Canadian users, according to this NY Times article called Scrabulous Barred to North American Users and anAssociated Press article called Popular Scrabble knockoff suspended on Facebook. There are lots of blog posts available, including my own billso.com post called Scrabble vs Scrabulous, Mashable’s Actually, Scrabulous Shut Themselves Down. Sort of., eFlux Media’s Scrabulous is no more and Marketing Shift’s Facebook Shutters Scrabulous; Hasboro Smiles. (Note: the spelling error was made by Marketing Shift, not me.)

It sounds like Facebook asked the brothers to take this step, after multiple requests from Hasbro.

Some Facebook users really need a lesson on copyright as well. Scrabulous may be fun, but the online groups that are defending the game are displaying their ignorance and contempt for intellectual property laws. It wouldn’t surprise me if many of Facebook Scrabulous players also downloaded unlicensed movies, songs and books from peer-to-peer services. I disucssed textbook downloading on yesterday’s billso.com post called A torrent of textbooks.

Perhaps some Scrabulous users will actually try to play Scrabble in real life, while Hasbro and Electronic Arts try to get their licensed Facebook Scrabble app to run in a reliable manner.

I’m a big fan of fair use and the Creative Commons, but I really hope Hasbro and Mattel pursue their court cases. The brothers are several weak arguments in their defense, and have shown poor judgment by collecting advertising revenue from their web site.  A settlement would set an ugly precedent, and encourage more developers to create unlicensed versions of copyrighted works.

Related posts on billso.com

• Copyright and fair use
• Creative Commons
• 8 July 2008: Scrabble vs Scrabulous
• 11 March 2008: Widgets won’t work without a plan
• 25 February 2008: Social media 101
• 19 February 2008: Social media gets too sticky
• 4 February 2008: Better than free
• 28 January 2008: Crazy money
• 3 January 2008: Impression management and Facebook
• 5 October 2007: What’s wrong with copyright
• 17 July 2007: A quick explanation of copyright law
• 10 August 2007: Forty-somethings flock to Facebook
• 20 June 2007: Facebook vs MySpace
• 29 September 2006: US copyright law in verse
• 5 August 2006: Isolated Americans trying to connect

As we approach the start of the academic year, the rising cost of almost everything has created a surge of interest in electronic books, in legal and unlicensed versions.

As we’ve discussed in earlier billso.com articles, college textbooks are expensive. Rising oil prices have fueled steep price increases for new books, and have driven up the prices of used textbooks.

In April 2008, Sage, Oxford and Cambridge recently sued four administrators at Georgia State University. The publishers believed that digital course packs assembled by faculty and posted to university servers violated the publishers’ copyright claims, as no licenses had been purchased for the articles or textbook chapters included in these downloads. This New York Times article called Publishers Sue Georgia State on Digital Reading Matter the Chronicle of Higher Education’s article Publishers Sue Georgia State U. for Copyright Infringement have additional details.

Meanwhile, one of the largest operators of college bookstores has purchased an e-publishing company. Follett believes that CafeScribe will become a dominant player in college e-book publishing, by helping students and faculty self-publish their materials in a social networking environment while offering electronic versions of printed textbooks. See this Will the CafeScribe Acquisition Give a Boost to Electronic Textbooks? for an interview with CafeScribe’s CEO, Bryce Johnson.

Textbook publishers have reluctantly adopted e-book and web-based publishing technologies, including multiple types of digital rights management (DRM). Some systems require students to log on or access the digital book from one specific computer. Other systems check for multiple sessions logged in with identical usernames.

Some publishers bundle web site access with new copies of their books. A coupon is included with the book, including a subscription code that gives the purchasing student 3 to 6 months of access to a companion web site that may include additional readings, exercises, downloads and streaming media. The coupon is useless after it’s used, so purchasers of the used book have to find their own access to the companion web site, or do without that material.

Scanning the material

Digital systems help publishers reduce their costs, but students continue to find way to break or defeat these systems. Creating a scanned textbook can be a labor-intensive task, but it’s manageable when the work is distributed among a group of people. The paper format of a book has been a mild form of physical rights management (PRM). There’s more discussion in this New York Times article called First It Was Song Downloads. Now It’s Organic Chemistry.

The scanned book is a collection of high-resolution image files, in which each page is captured as a single image file. Pages can be color corrected so that the final collection has natural renditions of the textbook’s colors. While this is trivial for a book that is entirely text, many college textbooks use multiple fonts, colors, images and callouts to engage the reader.

The image files are numbered in sequential order and cembedded into PDF files. If there are additional downloads or scereen captures from the companion website or optical disks, these files and the images can be compressed into a massive ZIP or RAR file.

In the past, the size of the file was a barrier to distribution. The widespread availability of broadband Internet access, along with massive, inexpensive hard drives, have driven down the average student’s costs of textbook piracy.

Encrypting the Internet

Peer-to-peer (P2P) networks are a popular distribution point for unlicensed, scanned versions of college textbooks. 

ISPs and copyright holders have developed elaborate systems to monitor and disrupt P2P networks. the BitTorrent protocol includes encryption support, to help users hide the contents of their packets. This newsteevee.com article called The Pirate Bay Wants to Encrypt the Entire Internet describes how one of the most popular P2P sites, Sweden’s The Pirate Bay, has proposed nothing less than a new encryption protocol to protect Internet traffic while in transit.

Transparent end-to-end encryption for the Internets or IPETEE could be installed as an application or driver in the client’s operating system, allowing any and every net-aware application on the computer to connect with encrypted peers and servers. Of course, ISPs could still detect the patterns and quantity of traffic coming from an encrypted client, and throttle or shut down the client’s bandwidth.

In the interest of full disclosure, I’m a chapter editor on a textbook that is scheduled for 2010. It’s called Managing Through Collaboration. I’ve also published a chapter in another textbook, and I was a contributing author on a Sybex CIW Foundations book in 2002. See the billso.com books page for more details.

Related articles and pages on billso.com

• Copyright and fair use
• Creative Commons
• 3 June 2008: 100 years of first sale
• 15 May 2008: Download that movie, lose your home
• 23 April 2008: Amazon’s Kindle hasn’t caught fire yet
• 14 April 2008: Virgin Media CEO claims net neutrality is “bollocks”
• 10 April 2008: Media giants want to end US fair use doctrine
• 21 February 2008: Copyright and fair use
• 4 February 2008: Better than free
• 13 November 2007: File sharing and campus security
• 5 October 2007: What’s wrong with copyright
• 13 November 2007: File sharing and campus security
• 17 July 2007: A quick explanation of copyright law
• 29 September 2006: US copyright law in verse
• 23 August 2004: Wheelock’s Latin holds the line on high textbook prices
• 15 August 2004: American Library Association promotes fair use
• 27 June 2003: Sue your best customers

Golden Shellback is a coating that is applied to mobile phones and other electronic gadgets. Apparently it requires placing the device in a vacuum chamber. Once the process is complete, the device can be dunked under a foot of water without damage.

If this really works, it’s remarkable. See gcaptain’s post Golden Shellback [via Gizmodo’s Waterproof Gadget Coating is Invisible, Mystifying, Mind Boggling Witchcraft and TekZilla for more details.

Golden Shellback Waterproof Coating from gCaptain.com on Vimeo.

As Yogi Berra might say, “The game isn’t over until it’s over”.

Even then, the game is still not over.

Let’s review the last week of Honolulu mass transit hilarity. Pardon the pun, but this entire process has become a train wreck that may well be decided in the courts.

I’ve made it clear in my previous articles that I favor the fixed guideway mass transit project. The island needs a better, scalable transit infrastructure. We already have too many cars on Oahu, and there’s not enough residential or commerical parking to handle them. There’s little or no room to expand the major surface roads. The US Department of Defense will not allow the state to build a tunnel, road or causeway around or under Pearl Harbor to handle the western suburban traffic that surges into Honolulu every morning. 

Light rail has its advantages. It’s a widely used technology on the mainland. Other vehicles can’t use the rails, so a rail fixed guideway would not be used by city and county trucks and cars on “emergencies”.  

But I like the flexibility of buses. The city has decades of experience with The Bus, and there are several thousand trained drivers, mechanics and other staff on Oahu. The new buses will require much larger elevated roadways than a rail system would need. It will be difficult to put these new buses on existing surface roads, but they’ll be able to service more areas than a rail line might.

A fixed guideway bus system could be built much more quickly than rail. 

At this point, I wish we could just go ahead with a project. But first, we’ll need more elections. The special-interest groups and politicians have made sure of that.

I just hope we won’t have referendums to decide where the stops will be located, or what color to paint the crosswalks! 

Kobayashi throws a wrench in the works

On Tuesday, 23 July 2008, City council member Ann Kobayashi, who prefers busses to rail, filed as a candidate in the mayoral election on the last day. Fellow council member Donovan Dela Cruz and former Hillary Clinton state campaign chair Colleen Hanabusa will run Kobayashi’s election campaign. See the Honolulu Advertiser’s article, Kobayashi gives up seat for mayoral bid, and the Honolulu Star-Bulletin’s article, Rail row prompts Kobayashi to run.)

Her filing set off a chain reaction as island politicians scrambled to the clerk’s office to file for elections. Duke Bainum, a Kobayashi supporter who was narrowly defeated by current Mayor Mufi Hannemann in 2004, filed for Ann’s seat on the city council - even though he’s lived off-island since he lost the election. State Representative Kirk Caldwell (D -24) also filed for the race, but Republican and Democratic Party officials are sparring over technicalities. (See the Honolulu Star-Bulletin’s stories Republicans cry foul and Last-minute decision sets off political flurry). 

Mayor Mufi Hannemann and Hanabusa have been touted as likely candidates for the Democratic gubernatorial primary in 2010. On Thursday evening, 24 July 2008, I was driving east on King Street, when I saw a few dozen people waving Mufi signs in front of the Blaisdell concert hall. Mayor Hannemann may have lost his re-election campaign this past week, but he will go down fighting.  

Let the mayor decide?

The next day, Wednesday, 24 July 2008, the Honolulu City Council unanimously approved Charles Djou’s proposal to put rail on the November general election ballot. While this proposal needs two more votes to get the measure on the ballot, and a potential veto by Mayor Hannemann, council members seem ready to abandon representative democracy and let the people decide rail’s fate on Oahu.

It’s really up to Mayor Hannemann at this point. He can veto the measure, and the Council cannot override his veto. The clerk’s office is also running out of time to get the measure on the general election ballot. 

No matter how a rail referendum turns out, council members can blame the voters for the outcome. As Todd Apo said at the meeting, “let’s get this over with”. See the Honolulu Advertiser and City council wants rail on the ballot.)

What’s next for the toll road supporters?

StopRailNow and its allied organizations are not endorsing a mayoral candidate yet, even their own member Professor Panos Prevedouros of the University of Hawaii at Manoa. Panos may want to step out of the race now, as it’s becoming clear that Ann will be a proxy candidate for the anti-rail groups. Ann has enonugh experience and backbone to spar with Mufi in a mayoral debate, while the professor is a one-issue candidate who lacks political campaign and debate experience.

The anti-rail groups have nothing to celebrate in the short term, as the fight over rail has accelerated and will likely end up in a Federal court. Incredible as it sounds, Honolulu may lose a billion dollars in federal funding if the fixed guideway mass transit question is not settled soon. It may be cheaper to build toll roads and reversible elevated lanes, but people will need cars or vans, and money for the tolls. These won’t be freeways. 

If some of these groups use the election to oppose any form of fixed guideway mass transit and promote elevated toll roads, Ann Kobayashi may surpass Linda Lingle in the informal competition to become the 21st century successor to Rene Mansho. 

Updated 10 am, 27 July 2008

Both Honolulu newspapers ran front page stories in today’s Sunday editions about their respective public opinion polls. Of course, each poll had its own questions about rail, and each poll concluded that about 2/3rds of the respondents wanted rail in Honolulu. A majority or respondents in each poll wanted the rail question on the ballot. 

Each poll was carried out with a local television station as a partner. 

The Honolulu Star-Bulletin (see Transit planning has many on board) and KITV4 included questions about Mayor Hannemann’s preferred system, steel-on-steel. Detailed results on are on these two pages. 

“I have always been in favor of mass transit, I voted for the fixed-guideway, but I am opposed to steel-on-steel,” Kobayashi said.

She argued that the transit system needs to be widely discussed in the community and said Hannemann has not been open to discussion.

The Star-Bulletin’s lead editorial called for a rail ballot, and recommended Charles Djou’s proposal for a city charter amendment. (See Let voters decide how to end debate on rail transit.) 

Meanwhile, KGMB9 and Gannett’s Honolulu Advertiser (see 76% of Oahu voters want rail on ballot) focused on reader comments. Many of the remarks were about the increased tax burden, and the lack of service for specific areas of Oahu. The detailed survey results are posted in this PDF document. The Advertiser will continue the story over the next 3 days, while KGMB starts a series about rail on its newscasts tomorrow evening.

RELATED TAGS ON BILLSO.COM

• mass-transit
• Honolulu

RELATED POSTS AND PAGES ON BILLSO.COM

• Honolulu mass transit
• 12 July 2008: My sidewalk nightmare
• 8 June 2008: Why Honolulu needs rail
• 20 April 2008: Honolulu newspapers to City Council: Enough already!
• 17 April 2008: Back on track
• 15 April 2008: City council members discuss mass transit research
• 2 April 2008: Still on track?
• 20 March 2008: Like a fifth wheel
• 2 July 2007: Parking in Chinatown is getting harder
• 21 June 2007: Mayor: state could pay for airport mass transit line
• 19 June 2007: City council, planners still arguing over mass transit routes, modes
• 15 June 2007: Telecommuting isn’t a free solution for Honolulu’s traffic woes

IBM has been using an social network called Beehive to help employees share pictures, videos, links and meet in ad hoc groups. Users can post, share and reuse top 5 lists, which are called Hive5s. The ability to reuse or reshare lists has been a key feature. Over 35,000 IBM employees were registered on Beehive as of May 2008, with 15000 Hive5 lists and over 280,000 shared connections. 

The Associated Press called this a virtual watercooler in a recent article. Intrenet Blog has its own article called Behind Beehive’s social success @ IBM that has a screenshot of the application - the default background color is yellow, not blue. 

LinkedIn is developing intranet applications for enterprise clients, so employees can share contact lists and create private connections within a secure enivronment

Facebook is also moving in this direction, if the reports from this week’s F8 developers conference in San Francisco are credible.

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• 19 June 2008: LinkedIn’s valuation reaches US$1 billion
• 23 May 2008: My social networking activity
• 4 April 2008: Get LinkedIn with billso.com
• 3 January 2008: Impression management and Facebook
• 10 August 2007: Forty-somethings flock to Facebook
• 20 June 2007: Facebook vs MySpace

News is trickling into the mainstream media about the DNS security hole that Dan Kaminsky found a while back. It’s a problem that has existed for years in the DNS software used on almost every major computing platform. With a trivial amount of CPU power, a cracker can redirect a web browser from a legitimate domain name to whatever server they wish. In some ways, it resembles a pharming attack. Details on how to perform the attack were made available this week, and there’s a brief description in a Register article called Exploit code for Kaminsky DNS bug goes wild.

The Domain Name System matches alphanumeric URLs like billso.com to their corresponding numeric IP address. If DNS is broken, the Internet is more or less broken.

Patches for these systems were released after 8 July 2008, when Kaminsky announced that the bug did indeed exist. Many server administrators haven’t installed the new DNS software yet.

According to another Register article called Worlds biggest ISPs drag their feet on critical DNS patch, the following providers haven’t performed the patch on their ISP networks:

• Time Warner Cable
• AT&T
• British Telecom
• Bell Canada
• T-Mobile

I tested Hawaiian Telcom’s DSL network last night: they failed, too.

I haven’t heard whether Comcast has fixed their DNS servers, but based on the New York Times article called GComplaining Bloggers Hava a Cable Company’s Ear, I’d think Comcast would respond quickly to blogged complaints about their DNS service.

HPU’s DNS servers on the wired and WiFi networks passed the test this morning when I checked them, and I’ve received confirmation that they patched their servers earlier this week. That’s good news, since HPU’s primary ISP is Oceanic Time Warner.

You can fix the DNS hole yourself

ISPs must offer certain services as part of an Internet connection. DNS is one of these services. Many ISPs run their own DNS servers, which connect to larger servers on the backbone. Corporations usually have their own DNS servers inside their network, to help users connect to internal resources like printers, servers, and network shares.

But residential users don’t HAVE to use their ISP’s DNS in most cases. If you have your own router at home, or you just plug your computer into a cable modem or a nearby WiFi network, you can use Dan Kaminsky’s tool to see if your DNS server is vulnerable. Use the Check Your DNS button in the upper-right corner of his blog pages at doxpara.com

For those of you on a school or company’s network, please check with your IT or network staff before changing your DNS settings.

If your ISP or WiFi network is using a vulnerable DNS server, you can use a free system called OpenDNS that is probably faster and safer that what you’re already using. It takes about 5 minutes to change your computer’s or your router’s domain name settings to use the OpenDNS servers.

Make sure you have administrative rights on your computer or router. Read the OpenDNS tutorial and make the appropriate choices. Be sure to reboot or restart your computer after confirming the changes. You may find that your Internet connection seems faster. That’s a nice benefit of OpenDNS for many users.

OpenDNS also screens out phishing sites, and lets users block or restrict access to entire categories of sites and specific URLs.

Chris Pirillo of Lockergnome has been ranting about the hole for several days now, but he’s got a point. Read his article called Is Your DNS Server Safe? for his thoughts.

Updated 29 July 2008 1930 HT: Here’s an article from John Markoff of the New York Times With Security at Risk, a Push to Patch the Web . Kaminsky estimates that 41% of all DNS servers still need the patch. With Kaminsky’s presentation coming up next week at the Black Hat conference, the clock is ticking. This article by Robert Westervelt of Security News called DNS flaw handling leaves Kaminsky pleased has some good quotes from Kaminsky about the scope of the DNS hole.

Related posts and pages on billso.com

• OpenDNS
• Hawaiian Telcom
• 24 February 2008: Pakistan blocks YouTube, breaks trust
• 15 January 2008: OpenDNS update
• 3 September 2007: When users block the ads, should web sites block the users?
• 13 July 2007: Speed up your broadband connection with OpenDNS

Every once in a while, I do a vanity check and run my name and URLs through Google. I don’t aspire to any level of Social Media Stardom, but it’s nice when someone reads my rants.

This Google gadget by Chris Anderson automates the process, and uses Google’s PageRank system to provide some metrics. I found the gadget in a Wired article called Internet Famous.

When I ran “Bill Sodeman” through that Vanity Validator gadget, I got a score of 54%.

Not bad, considering the scores I obtained for some very well-known bloggers:

• 67%: Julia Allison
• 61%: Dave Winer
• 59%: Ze Frank
• 59%: Robert Scoble
• 57%: Chris Pirillo
• 54%: Gina Trapani
• 54%: Bill Sodeman
• 47%: Cory Doctorow

But there’s room for improvement.

Ever wonder if solar cells would make a hybrid car more efficient? Toyota is preparing a solar power option for the Prius hybrid car. The panels would recharge the car’s electric batteries while the car is in moderate to bright sunlight.

The US National Renewable Energy Laboratory (NREL) decided to test the concept of this system. Their engineers modified the charging system so the car can be plugged into a large set of turbines or solar panels. A regular 110 volt AC outlet will also work. This article called NREL’s Prius Hits 100 Miles per Gallon has more details. 

NREL also hired Solar Electrical Vehicles to add a rooftop solar charging system to the vehicle. The solar cell was glued to the roof of the vehicle. However, it’s a low power rig, generating a maximum of 215 watts from 146 four-inch-square crystalline-silicon cells. The real benefit comes from the additional 3000 volt battery that can store power from the Prius drivetrain, the solar cells, and the plug-in charging system. Total cost of the modded Prius is US$70000 - the mods alone cost US$42500.

Another company, Solatec, markets a less powerful, less expensive kit that produces only 24 watts of power using a smaller set of roof-mounted solar panels that resemble wide racing stripes. It’s designed to run the Prius’ air conditioner, sound system and other devices, and provides a 2 mpg improvement in fuel economy for US$1075.

The hybrid explosion

The hybrid car market has heated up in the last year. Dealers cannot keep hybrids in stock - in fact, some models have long waiting lists. Saturn of Honolulu was allocated only 4 VUE Green line hybrid SUVs for the 2008 model year.

Honda has announced it will build half a million hybrids a year by 2010, including versions of the Accord, Fit, and a new hybrid-only model. I’ve long hoped for a hybrid Element, put that has not been announced yet. Honda engineers hope to reduce the incremental cost of a hybrid to US$2000, compared to the current $3000 standard. Honda’s hybrid system is simpler and less powerful than others, but it’s easier to integrate the design into existing gas-only models. 

Toyota is releasing 5 hybrid-only models in the US at that time, including a minivan and a new Prius. Even if Toyota can’t ramp up its own production, it will make money by licensing its hybrid engine technology to other car manufacturers, including Ford and Nissan. General Motors is licensing its own hybrid tech to Daimler, BMW and Chrysler.  Chevrolet is rushing its Volt electric car into production as well. 

See this MIT Technology Review article called Does Car Mounted Solar Make Sense? and these Business Week article called Honda Goes Whole Hog for Hybrids and Is GM’s Green Tech Better Than Toyota’s for more links and information.

Image courtesy of Abrilon through a Creative Commons license. 

Related articles on billso.com

• 6 July 2008: Dubai tower twists and turns with solar and wind power
• 21 June 2008: Gallons per mile: Making fuel economy easy to understand
• 14 May 2008: Google makes more investments in alternative energy
• 11 April 2008: Cellular base station uses wind and solar power
• 7 March 2008: Solar-powered Bluetooth headset

Does anyone need a reminder about lightning and electronic equipment? It’s a bad idea to do the following while lightning is in the vicinity, especially if you are outside and near tall trees;

• Listen to a radio
• Listen to an iPod
• Use a personal computer
• Operate a video recorder

The woman who shot this video was hit by lightning - and it’s all on tape, including her scream. She lived:

From what i understand, it went through my left hand holding the camera, crossed my back and exited out of my right hand holding onto the metal railing. No entry or exit wounds, as i was not directly struck, i got just a really good zap from one of the “finger arcs” that happen when lightning hits.

See the comments and the video on Flickr (via BoingBoing and LaughingSquid).

There’s a free WordPress app for the iPhone and the iPod Touch at the iTunes App Store. I posted this article with the app.

More information and a demo video are available at the official web page at iphone.wordpress.org

There are over 1 million records covering 400,000 names on the US Government’s terrorist watch list, according to this Reuters article, U.S. terrorism watch list tops 1 million. 

How in the name of good common sense can this list be effective? That’s what the ACLU would like to know, and I agree with them.

According to a survey by the Association of Corporate Travel Executives, 7 percent of the respondents had at least one electronic device seized for inspection while traveling. As the New York Times points out in this op-ed piece, The Government and Your Laptop, searching a computer or cell phone can involve much more information than a simple luggage search might reveal. 

Whatever happened to the Fourth Amendment? I know the US Senate, including Senators Inouye (D-HI) and Obama (D-IL) tossed it under the bus last week when they extended the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA). Hillary Clinton (D-NY) and Daniel Akaka (D-HI) voted no, while John McCain (R-AZ) did not vote on the measure - see the roll call. 

At least the ACLU has filed a suit to halt FISA - see this Wired article called Bush Signs Spy Bill, ACLU Sues for details.