Who needs 1984 when we’ve got Foursquare?

Online snooping is getting worrying – but if we want to stop this, we must ask some fundamental questions about social media.

The next poster in the series says "Facebook is privacy"

When George Orwell created Nineteen Eighty-Four and Big Brother in 1948, he could scarcely have imagined the future. Not so much the nightmarish vision of the Ministry of Truth, Ministry of Plenty, Ministry of Peace and Ministry of Love, but two things he would never have guessed. Firstly, the emergence of god-awful reality TV show Big Brother (and all the other god-awful reality TV programmes it spawned), and secondly, a load of persecution complex-ridden Middle Englanders who says “It’s just like 1984” every time they get a speeding fine. I suppose some bits bear resemblance to the book, but that tends to be things like petty council officials invoking anti-terrorist laws over littering. All in all, it’s a bit of a damp squib.

But fear not, Mr. Orwell, all is not lost. Recently we have seen the arrival of a new program called RIOT (Rapid Information Overlay Technology). This little device uses information from social networks to track the movements of individual people. It is suggested this could be used as ways of monitoring people who are about to commit a crime – cue analogies to Precrime in Minority Report – but just like its ficticious counterpart, there are serious questions of how reliable this would actually be. Certainly there’s not much enthusiasm from the Police. Which makes me think the key market might be employers. Like a retail manager who wants to know if his staff are shopping at competitors. Or a civil servant checking which pesky underlings attend opposition party meetings in the run-up to an election. This could be fantastic news – if you are a control freak with lots of money and power.

A harsh lesson for Facebook

As expectations for a free internet increase, more novel ways have to be found to make money. Instagram is a prime example of how not to do it.

“Hello John. You only did six Facebook Status Updates yesterday. Why don’t you buy
the new iThing plus max supreme, with new Facebook infinity plugin included?”

There’s a famous scene from the Stephen Spielberg classic Minority Report depicting a possible future of advertising. In the film, whenever our hero John Anderton enters shopping centre, the nearest advertising billboard scans his irises and says “You, John Anderton, need a holiday / designer jacket / ticket to the Superbowl.” (And when he gets a new pair of eyes on the black market, the adverts change to “You, Mr. Yakamoto, need a holiday / designer jacket / ticket to the Superbowl.”)

Like most science fiction films, it sought to portray an uncomfortable vision of the future, in this case one with scant disregard for civil rights or privacy. However, it appears that the advertising industry completely missed the point and thought Mr. Spielberg was portraying a rosy future where hard-working businesses can sell more products to consumers through a “relevant adverting experience”. At least, this would explain the logic behind those internet adverts of “57-year-old [Insert location you are accessing internet from] Mom looks 27 – click here to discover her secret”. It would also explain why, when you look at one website, the adverts of that product keep following you to other sites – an action I find comparable to sales reps from Boots following you into Debenhams and Costa to pester you into buying the shampoo you were vaguely browsing.

They haven’t quite reached the technology needed to do full Minority Report -style advertising, but recently a photo-sharing site decided it would join in the fun. Yes, following its recent acquisition by Facebook, Instagram helpfully informed its customers, somewhere in its new terms and conditions, stating that in one month’s time they’d have the right to use your photos for any advertising they want One problem: in most cases, it’s not just the consent of the uploader you need: you also need the consent of the photographer (who is not necessarily the uploader) and for adverts you really need the consent of the people in the photos too. So really the only practical legal way they could use this is to use people’s photos as personalised adverts directed at them. Not sure what they had in mind – maybe “If you liked these hills, you’ll love the hills in Bratislakislavia which you can now reach with cheap flights from us. Click Here.” Anyway, we’ll never find out what their plans were because a massive backlash forced them into a U-turn.

Where's H. G. Wells when you need him?

Is advertising really legalised lying? In cyberspace, it seems, the answer is still yes.

Bad and wrong. But is this coming to YouTube?

Okay, I’m back. Sorry about my long period of absence from this blog. Much as I enjoy a blog on software testing, actual software testing got in the way and I’ve been super-busy for the best part of two months. But this work has finally come to a close so I can now get back to this. And the thing that I’ve wanted to get off my chest for the last two months is a pet hate to many people: internet advertising. Yes, I can hear you all now going "Oh God, I hate those things".

I’ll start with an obvious defence: if we want an internet, we need ads. Some websites, such as this one, are done by people in their spare time (which can be sporadic, as this one has just shown), whilst others, such as BBC News, are funded by other means. But for many sites, somebody has to be paid to create the content, and the only source of revenue is from the website itself. Even ad-free sites can depend on adverts. This blog, for instance, has no adverts, and I want to keep it that way, but I’ll admit that Blogger would never have developed the blogging tools and hosted the blog for free without the cut Google gets from adverts on other blogs they host. There are some interesting suggestions for online micro-payments as an alternative to ads or subscriptions, but there is little interest in making this a reality. Like it or not, adverts are just as much a part of the internet as they are to ITV.

Is superfast broadband always a good thing?

As superfast broadband gets adopted by more and more people, we must not shut out those people who cannot have this.

Are you listening to me, Network Rail? Look how quickly this image downloads on my site.

One of the perks of being a software tester is that you can take your work home with you and tell managers of other public-facing software (especially websites) what they're doing wrong. I've recently been arguing with Network Rail over the redevelopment of Birmingham New Street station. No complaints about the redevelopment itself (anyone who's actually used this station will be able to tell you why); my problem is pages like this one. Can you spot what's wrong with it? Possibly not, if you've got a fast internet link. But if you're on a slow internet connection, it takes ages to download the pictures and chews up your bandwidth – about 5MB for three images. And to illustrate just how unnecessary this is, here is the full picture you have to download in order to view a small (304px × 172px) image.¹

This is an example of lazy programming that suits the majority but excludes the minority. This is nothing new – it is been going on ever since the internet began. In the 90s there was Netscape Mail's HTML-only e-mails (absolutely and totally utterly vital so that you can write in multi-coloured Comic Sans font), instantly rendering them unreadable to people on text-based programs such as pine. Then came Internet Explorer's dominance and the web pages that didn't work in any other browsers, or worse, did work in other browsers but blocked them anyway because “it's designed for IE”. Meanwhile, we were plagued with Flash-only websites, removing perfectly decent text content away from many users with sight disabilities. What all these have in common in that all of this was completely unnecessary – it wouldn't have required any more work to make websites accessible to everyone, just a little bit of thought.

Time for a whitelist?

Here’s a new approach to a safe internet: instead of trying to filter out unsuitable content for children, how about an opt-in system?

A low-tech solution. But some of the high-tech solutions are worse.

For some reason, the news story that’s all the rage at the moment is how to stop children looking at internet porn. I’m not sure exactly what’s happened to bring this, but I can vouch it’s a tricky one. Not so long ago we were looking into testing a website for, amongst other things, checking content was suitable for everyone to access. It would potentially involve moderating everything posted, including forums, applications and documents. And even if we could vet all of that, what’s to say a linked page site will be suitable? And what about linked sites from linked sites? And linked sites from linked sites from linked sites? Not easy at all.

Now, I’ve always thought that the same rules should apply on the internet as apply everywhere else. For adults, the basic principle, quite rightly, is that you should have the choice to view what you want (bar a few accepted limits such as paedophilia, certain depictions of rape, incitement to violence and so on). For children, there are a few rules such as 12-, 15- and 18-rated films, but it’s broadly viewed as the job of a parent to decide what they should see, and that’s the way it should be. The internet, however, has made this job harder. Yes, in the old days there was lying about your age when seeing an X-rated film, or borrowing the mag your mate got off the top shelf, but it’s now possible to view this stuff without even leaving your room, so it must be taken very seriously.

Are web designers the new car mechanics?

Websites are easier to make than most people think. Bear this in mind when a website designer wants a hefty payment.

A joke, obviously. But does this sales pitch work in IT?

Advance warning: this post is another moan. Up to now, I’ve had two pet hates: people who sign up to wildly optimistic cheap/convenient IT projects that turn out to be unreliable and expensive; and at the other end, people who block trivially easy IT projects because of silly overblown cost estimates. I’d forgotten the third type. But we’ll get on to that later.

This story begins with my website – you know, the one in my shameless plug masquerading as a piece on Search Engine Optimisation. Well, my web traffic is still quite abysmal, in spite of pushing up the Google rankings. But from the few people who’ve looked at the site, I’m quite likely to set up a website for an arts organisation, which I’m happy to do as a freebie; and if all goes well I may get some paid work off the back of that. And in this scenario, the obvious question is: how much should I ask to be paid?

The thing is, there’s nothing special about my web design knowledge. What I created for myself was technically very basic (I was using a free web template and Kompozer if anyone's wondering). I’d rate my skills above those of a 13-year-old who has discovered FrontPage – I do at least understand the importance of Cascading Style Sheets, W3C compliance and not doing fancy animated backgrounds – but ask me to produce a site that handles user-uploaded content, streaming video or credit card payments and I wouldn’t have a clue. And yet paltry offerings to the interweb like mine seem to be regarded as the height of technical genius.

How to win attention and annoy people

Search Engine Optimisation is big business in IT. It’s just a pity it’s become so intrusive.

It used to be this simple

(Photo from SMBSEO.com)

Can I have your attention please? I apologise in advance, but I am about to abuse my position as a software tester. No, I’m not going to sell confidential client information to Russian spies or anything like that, but I am nonetheless going to misuse this blog to further my personal interests outside of my job. All right. Are you ready? Let’s do a countdown and get this over with. 5 … 4 … 3 … 2 … 1 …

Click Here.

Actually, you needn’t click there if you don’t want to. I’m not too fussed either way. For those who didn’t bother clicking, that was a link to my web site on play writing, which is what I do in my alternate life. I don’t care too much whether you view it – seriously, there can’t be that many people with interests in both software testing and theatre in the vicinity of Durham – but that’s not the purpose of the link. The purpose of the link is for Google and other search engines to know it’s there. Because the more links Google finds to your page, the higher it gets up the page rankings.