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Loading ...Facebook meets the Weekly World News
Welcome to Shane Schick’s Computerworld. I am Shane’s assistant editor, Greg Meckbach. Last week, I admitted to having lied about my age on Facebook. The consequences have not been severe, as I still have my job and can still log into Facebook.
But some lies published on Facebook have more serious consequences. This week, Associated Press published a story by Meera Selva about Matthew Firsht, a British man who was awarded 22,000 pounds (more than $45,000) worth of damages after a former colleague, Grant Raphael, allegedly published false allegations on Facebook about Firsht.
Firsht sued Raphael for libel and breach of privacy after someone used Raphael’s computer to publish both personal information, and false allegations, about Firsht.
Raphael had claimed the posts were actually published by miscreants who crashed a party at his place. The court did not believe him.
Regardless of who published the information (and misinformation) about Firsht, this would not be the first time someone has used a social networking site for malicious purposes
AP quoted Firsht’s lawyer as saying the decision “is likely to send shockwaves amongst the social networking community” because there are “similar instances” of libel and breach of privacy that “go unchecked everyday.”
As of Friday, the shockwaves had not hit our offices. If you were skeptical in high school about the claims made by anonymous graffiti scribes on washroom walls, you should probably remain skeptical about personal information (especially juicy gossip) made through social networking forums.
Facebook, of course, is much more sophisticated than a washroom wall. It has 284 groups on ERP alone, while a search for groups about network security yielded more than 500 results. Though it doesn’t depend heavily on any new technologies (unless you consider the Internet, the database and the graphical user interface as new technologies), it’s an innovative method of using existing technologies to build a powerful networking and communication tool. The Firsht case should not surprise anyone. It’s just another indication that the information disseminated through communications media, no matter how sophisticated, is only as reliable as the person from whom the information originates.
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(No Ratings Yet) Loading ...Good thing I lied about my age
Hello and welcome to Shane Schick’s Computerworld. I am Shane’s assistant editor, Greg Meckbach. Shane will be away for a while. See his most recent post below.
I have two confessions to make. First, I have been a luddite, and did not sign up for Facebook until nearly a year ago, when I joined ComputerWorld Canada and made a profile for our group. The second confession is, I lied about my age to join Facebook. When I joined, I got following message: “Facebook requires all users to provide their real date of birth as both a safety precaution and as a means of preserving the integrity of the site.”
Whatever. My first thought was, “Holy cow, how gullible do you think I am?” Instead of entering my real date of birth, I chose a date in history that’s easy for me to remember. Without going into detail, my fake birthday is more than 30 years prior to my real birthday, which is probably why I keep seeing ads for items like dentures and Depends when I log onto Facebook. When friends and family asked why, I said I would never enter my real date of birth on a social networking site, because that information is highly sensitive. Not because I’m embarrassed to be born on such and such a date, but it’s because security experts at financial companies like MasterCard have decided that the best way to verify the identity of a caller is to ask his or her date of birth. Plus I was a little skeptical of Facebook’s claim that “you will be able to hide this information from your profile if you wish.”
Some would say I was paranoid, but as we reported Thursday, Facebook accidentally made its members’ dates of birth public on its beta site.
This ties into the issue of electronic medical records. One major argument against the entry of medical records into electronic form is the risk of a security breach if it’s not properly encrypted. While this is a valid concern, I would argue a person’s date of birth is actually more sensitive than his or her medical information. Given the choice between having my cholesterol count published on the Internet, and having some fraud artist (who already knows my mother’s maiden name and banking information) find out my date of birth, I’d prefer to get the medical information leaked.
Now, as Mark Steyn would say, I have to add the “of course” clauses. Of course some people have medical conditions that they would rather not be made public. Of course privacy is not the only impediment to the digitization of medical records. Of course it’s difficult to rob a person blind simply by obtaining his or her date of birth. This doesn’t change the fact that when a social networking site asks for your date of birth, it’s kind of like asking for your latest medical records. You just have to hope they’re smart enough to keep this information private.
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(No Ratings Yet) Loading ...Oh, baby! Why I won’t be blogging for the next month
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(No Ratings Yet) Loading ...Even home users of Microsoft Office need to be well ‘Equipt’
If I’d just waited a few more weeks I might not have had to spend so much buying Office.
Thanks a lot, Microsoft, for only announcing your subscription-based plan for users of your productivity suite after I just put money down on a brand-new notebook. Office was part of the bundle they offered us at Future Shop, but it still tacked down an extra couple of hundred dollars to the purchase price. Under the Equipt program, Microsoft will charge users for programs like Word, PowerPoint and Excel in much the same way that corporate customers are acquiring new software, and in some cases it could be a lot cheaper.
It will not, however, be free, which is why Equipt is unlikely to stem the tide of free software from Google and other companies. The boxed version of Office was never really in short-term jeopardy anyway. Those downloading OpenOffice and the like are probably more savvy than the average Future Shop customer, and probably not Microsoft fans anyway. For the rest of us, it will take more time before even Google’s productivity tools enjoy the kind of mind share that, for example, Word does. But as long as Equipt costs money, it won’t be able to compete with free, and eventually the features might be even more attractive than the price point. What Google et. al are offering aren’t simply loss leaders; they are market leaders-in-waiting.
IT managers could probably safely ignore Equipt were it not for the fact that home computing software is likely to be used for after-hours work tasks as well. Their choice of productivity tools could have a direct bearing on their acceptance and adoption of the tools that are given to them by their IT department, affecting the level of training required and even the kind of processes that are set up. Google Apps and OpenOffice work a lot like Microsoft Office, but there are some things they do better or worse, and several things they do a little bit differently. That can affect things when you’re working with distributed teams, some of whom are working off-site at home or in the field on their personal laptop.
For companies that have basically standardized on Microsoft, it might make sense to recommend Equipt, giving employees the chance to stay as up-to-date on the home versions of their software as the ones on their office desktops. For others, it might be irrelevant. It all depends on whether these software products remain simple productivity tools, and there’s a lot of evidence to suggest they aren’t. As word processing documents, spreadsheets and similar applications get integrated with enterprise business functionality (including analytics), what users deploy at home should be consistent with their corporate settings unless management decides productivity should be confined to corporate headquarters.
Although we still refer to “professional edition” and “home edition” for a lot of people, Microsoft Office is just “Office.” Equipt will be one of the ways the industry learns whether the distinction still has a lot of meaning for the consumers that get a lot of work done outside of “work.”
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(No Ratings Yet) Loading ...You’re either satisfied with your IT job or you’re not
Whenever we publish the results of IT World Canada’s annual salary survey (buy the full report here), everyone automatically looks at the big numbers and compares how they rank with their peers. That’s the whole point of this project. But beyond the coverage we’ve already provided, there were a couple of other points around job satisfaction that I think should be highlighted and further explored.
First, the good news: Overall, 87 per cent of all technology professionals said they would recommend IT as a career choice. Think about that for a minute. Despite all the budget constraints, the outsourcing, the user griping, the unrealistic deadlines and the manipulative vendors, a lot of people would encourage others to follow in their footsteps. That’s a ringing endorsement of this industry, and a healthy sign that IT presents the kind of variety, challenges and (yes) compensation that provides personal fulfillment.
But when you look a little deeper, the picture becomes a bit murky. For example, 60 per cent of those we spoke to said they are either satisfied or very satisfied with their job. Fourteen percent said they were either dissatisfied or very dissatisfied. But there was another entire quarter of respondents, 25 per cent, who said they were “neither satisfied nor dissatisfied” with their jobs in IT.
You could blame this on the question, of course. What does it really mean to be neither/nor? In fact, it means a lot. It means you’re not sure how to gauge your overall job satisfaction, and that depending on your circumstances, outlook and options, the pendulum could swing either way.
Looked at another way, it’s possible to interpret that 25 per cent as being unable to make up their mind because their job is changing so much. They might have been hired on for their technology expertise but are now being thrown business-related responsibilities for which they are unprepared. Or they are in training mode, trying to adjust to a new reality and simply need more time to make up their mind about how satisfying it is.
Having that many people sitting on the fence is not healthy for the long-term retention prospects of the enterprises that employ them. Making them more satisfied could come down to pay – the average salary this year was nearly $78 – but it will also be about how well companies can define what the role of IT departments will be. If they properly understand what their responsibilities are, and if their efforts are recognized appropriately, they might at least say they’re satisfied. But even to have more IT people dissatisfied or very dissatisfied would be better, because the root causes would likely be easier to identify.
Can you really say it’s a good idea to go into IT when you’re not sure how you actually feel about it yourself? It doesn’t really seem to make a lot of sense. Unless . . . maybe 87 per cent say information technology is a good career choice because, their personal satisfaction notwithstanding, they still see possibilities in it. Buried within all the statistics around what ends up on an IT manager’s paycheque, perhaps we have stumbled on a measurement of hope.
