Customer Innovation

2. March, 2011

Have you ever modified something you bought in a shop? You’re not alone. A study in England showed that 6.2 percent of the population does it. The modifications range from simple things like adding rubber to the dog’s feeding bowl to reprogramming a GPS to make it easier to use.

Apparently, the users of products invest 2.3 times more money in making things better than the companies who build them in the first place. Bad news for companies who hate it when someone touches their stuff …

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Posted by digulla

How Public is Your Privacy?

2. March, 2011
Malte Spitz

Image via Wikipedia

Under German law, any person can request all the data which a company has stored about him- or herself. Politician Malte Spitz of the Alliance ’90/The Greens Party did this with his mobile provider. The Vorratsdatenspeicherung is a German law which requires telecommunication providers to save all traffic data for 6 months. This way, he got a whole profile about himself. ZEIT ONLINE used this data along with other public information like Twitter and Blogs to create an impressive view on Spitz’s life during those six month.

If you want to see for yourself how it feels to watch and be watched, visit this interactive website that allows you to browse his life: Mobile Traitor.

The text on the page reads:

Politician Malte Spitz of the Green Party sued the German Telekom for six months of his data retention and handed it over to ZEIT ONLINE. On the basis of this data, you can watch all his movements during this time. We matched the geodata with freely accessible information from the Internet about the delegate (Twitter, Blog posts and web sites).

The Play button starts the journey through Malte Spitz’s life. The speed control [“Geschwindigkeit”] allows to adjust the pace or stop anytime with the Pause button. The calendar below also shows when he was visiting the same place again – and you can use it to move to any point in time manually. Each vertical bar represents one day.

To the right of the map is an explanation what he did, the number of incoming and outgoing calls, how many SMS he received and sent and how much time he spent online.

All the data is available as a Google Docs table, too (“Download Datensatz“).

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Posted by digulla

goosh

2. March, 2011

Missing the good old command line when searching the web? Have a look at goosh.org.

Amazing fact: It was written in 2008 and still works!

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Posted by digulla

Good Overview How Sony Treated Its Customers Over The Years

1. March, 2011
Magic Link

Image via Wikipedia

Phillip Torrone posted a good overview of Sony’s treatment of its customers over the years: Sony’s War On Makers, Hackers, And Innovators

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Posted by digulla

LG Angry at Sony

1. March, 2011

It seems that harassing customers isn’t enough. In a nice move to complete their list of enemies, they pissed of LG, too. Patent infringement. LG won preliminary injunction against Sony and the European customs now have to seize PlayStation shipments. 🙂

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Posted by digulla

So Nie

28. February, 2011

“So Nie” (pronounced like “Sony”) is German and means “never like that.” On February, 23rd, Sony ordered a raid on Alexander ‘graf_chokolo‘ Egorenkov. Alex found the master keys used in the PS3‘s broken encryption system. Epic fail for the guys who wrote the code.

Instead of simply fixing their mistake with a patch (like the other console vendors did), Sony now tries to bully the world into submission. By setting the value of the court case to 1 Million Euros, they make it deliberately impossible for Alex to defend himself in court – just to hire a lawyer would cost € 30’000.

If he could get a good one. Otherwise, it’s just wasted money because a good (expensive) lawyer can get you in jail for damaging the fists of the plaintiff with your face. Repeatedly.

Alex’ response? “If you want me to stop then you should just kill me[…]”

So what’s in it for you? For starters, stop buying anything from Sony, the company which really likes to abuse their customers.

If you can’t live without your games, stop buying new games, only second hand ones. They are cheaper, as good as the new ones, you don’t need to be online to play them. And it’s an easy and efficient way to tell Sony how you feel about their behavior.

Unplug your PS3 and play only offline. If a game stops working, return it. That costs them more than you.

Spread the word. Nothing is as expensive as a bad reputation.

Read geohot’s new blog; he’ll announce donation requests there to pay for his lawyers.

The world is the place we make it or the place Sony makes it.

[Update] You might want to read this, too: What’s Happening in the Class Action Against Sony About Removing OtherOS? I really like this quote: “And the plaintiffs have been following the SCEA v. Hotz case, and they noticed what they believe are contradictions between what Sony says in that case and what it says in this one.” Oops.

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Fixing Screen Refresh Problems with KDE 4.6

23. February, 2011

If you have problems with your screen in KDE 4.6 (application windows don’t get restored correctly after minimizing them; windows won’t update after a change; when overwriting selected text, part of the selected text stays on the screen; popup windows leave black boxes), try this: Switch the “Compositing Type” from “OpenGL” to “XRender” (in “System Settings” -> “Desktop Effects” -> “Advanced” tab).

As a nice side effect, this reduced the CPU usage of KWin from 10-30% to 0%.

Some desktop effects don’t work with this setting but in return, the UI feels more snappy.

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Posted by digulla

Hunting The Innocent

21. February, 2011
child abuse

Image by Southworth Sailor via Flickr

How would you like if the government told thousands of people that you’re a pedophile?

Not much? Well, the “war” against child abuse just caused a little bit of collateral damage: Visitors of 84’000 domains got a warning that they tried to visit a site which is “… affiliated with creating, distributing, and/or storing child pornography.”

Oops. Imagine you spent years to create a reputation and it’s destroyed like that. That’s the reason why the law starts with the presumption of innocence. If you start from the viewpoint of “guilty,” too many innocent bystanders get harmed.

Which is what’s wrong with the current situation, no matter if it’s child abuse or war. The thought “no one is truly innocent” directly leads to the conclusion: “It doesn’t matter how many people we hurt, as long as at least one of them is guilty of something.” It’s an excuse for excessive abuse of power.

Justice means to find a balance between the abstract, idealistic demands of a law on paper and the actual, real-life situations. Bypassing justice is always unjust.

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Posted by digulla

Dilbert’s Boss is Right Once

21. February, 2011

For the first time, Dilbert’s Boss gets something right: http://dilbert.com/strips/comic/2011-02-20/

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Posted by digulla

Persona Management

21. February, 2011

I’ve just found this disturbing blog: UPDATED: The HB Gary Email That Should Concern Us All

It’s about “persona management“, basically an “army of sockpuppets[sic]” that help to control some opinion online. It would allow a small group to appear as a large audience, contaminating the way in which we create trust and socialize.

I wonder what the counter strategy is for something like that.

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Posted by digulla

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