If you have $1,500 burning a hole in your pocket and don’t feel you stand out enough in a socially awkward way, then you’re in luck!

Starting yesterday, anyone who wants can buy Google Glass. Originally it was only available to beta testers, but now anyone can buy a pair, although the device itself is still in beta. Not only that, they’re only for sale to the general public as long as Google has them in stock. On the other hand, as the linked article states it might be better to wait until official release when they’ll be attached to frames from such companies as RayBan and Oakley.

Google refers to people who are testing their glasses as ‘Explorers,’ but others have less dignified names. So if you don’t mind people snarkily referring to you as a ‘Glasshole‘ – something even Google itself doesn’t want you to be – and want to give a new technology a try (and are rich), then jump in! You can buy them here. Be aware: the backlash can be severe; we’re already seeing signs stating Google Glass is banned in some places.

About a month ago I deactivated my Facebook account. I needed a break from the ‘OMG please like and share!!’ posts, the blatantly self-promotional posts, the Foursquare check-ins that just tell me you’re not home in case I want to burglarize the place, and the passive-aggressive posts that provide no context yet scream out for a response. You know the ones – they say something along the lines of ‘well this sucks’ and nothing else, begging you to pry in a false display of concern.

I even saw conversations happen on Facebook among people who lived in the same house!

So I needed a hiatus. Facebook was just causing me too much stress, with the ratio of inane, nonsense posts to valuable, informative posts being very high. It appears, however, that in doing so I am in the vast minority. According to this article on Cnet, immediate feedback on Facebook posts is required for many people to feel a sense of belonging, to feel involved, loved, and worthy. In other words, without immediate feedback to posts people suffer measurable drops in self-esteem and self-value, they feel ostracized and no longer part of a social circle or group of friends. Even depression can result. The Atlantic has a brutally in-depth article about technology, Facebook included, actually making us lonelier as our social interaction moves all on-line to the increasing exclusion of actual human contact.

Answer: Yes. Also, don’t think what this image depicts doesn’t happen.

This is troublesome, a continuing example of the move to virtual interaction over actual interaction. I was astounded, and more than a little distressed, when a couple of friends (not many, mind you, I vanished from Facebook almost unnoticed, apparently) informed me, one via email and one via text, that they didn’t know how to get in touch with me any other way than Facebook. Apparently they didn’t realize they had just contacted me in a way other than Facebook.

I don’t have anything inherently against Facebook, I used it to keep in touch with people all over the world, it was good for sharing photos and interesting tidbits and even for group meetings for projects on which I was involved, and it does provide a valuable source of social interaction. It’s good for those things and I don’t think people should abandon it. But when it starts to become the barometer of your self-worth and your value as a person, something is very, very wrong. Personal interaction is monumentally important, but actual personal interaction, not just virtual.

Let’s get outside, people! Call someone on the phone!

(In the interests of full disclosure, my understanding is if I log back on to Facebook it will all come back, so perhaps in the future I will do that; never say never!)

Remember we talked in class about the 419 scams? The scams in which someone sends you an email saying you are a beneficiary to a foreign dignitary with no heirs and they would like to offer you a million dollars or so to help them transfer funds to an American bank account?

My NSC account finally got its first one. Here, in all its glory, is what they sent.

—
Attn: Beneficiary.

Note that in regards to your over due funds release to you, your due required fees has been settled by the central bank through the federal high court in Lagos in a 14 page affidavit sworn on your behalf and we hereby notify you that your funds have been cleared to be delivered to you through the UN zonal office here in London.

Be officially informed that Patrick Howard, a diplomat attached with the UN zonal office will inform you of his arrival with your funds by tomorrow, please you are urgently required to forward your address and your direct telephone number immediately.

Thanks for your urgent co-operation.

Regards,

Mr Mauri Butlear
UN Zonal Office,
3 Whitehall Court London SW1A 2EL
United Kingdom
—

As you can see, it is completely legitimate. By which I mean not legitimate at all. There is no UN ‘Zonal Office,’ there is no ‘Mr. Mauri Butlear,’ and there is no money waiting. Remember, if you get anything like this, DO. NOT. RESPOND. If you do, they will never, ever let go.

On another note, I meant to show this in class but didn’t get the chance: this is the message I received from Apple when I needed to change my password. This is what makes passwords weak, not strong. It’s what causes people to write them down which negates their effectiveness. This is terrible password policy.

I don’t remember what password I used, of course. I guess I’ll be seeing this window again.

Just a quick note to anyone who may be interested – although commenting will obviously no longer be required (Sunday was the last day comments counted towards your grade), I will continue to make posts and you are welcome to follow along or even comment if you are so inclined; everyone is welcome! The 419 scam / Apple-password entry below is the first post-class post to start off the summer.

If you need to get in touch with me, if you have a tech-related question you’d like to ask or need more info on something, you can contact me through my NSC email address, but not Canvas as I won’t be checking that after Wednesday.

Either way, it was a wonderful semester, a great class, and a pleasure to have you all be part of it!

This week’s discussion question was about passwords and password strength, and from the responses I’ve seen so far it was enlightening for some of you to see the relative strength and weakness of your passwords.

I’m just going to leave this image here, it’s the 25 worst passwords of 2013. If you read the story at the Tech Times website, they’re also the most common. It’s not actually a direct match, but it’s pretty close. Don’t use these passwords! If you are still doing so after class, then you deserve to have all your monkeys stolen.

That’s right, in an explosion of serendipity based on our discussion and all the talk of passwords, it turns out today is World Password Day, a day created by Intel and MacAfee to encourage people to change their passwords.

As the linked article states, the common password used last year was ‘123456,’ but that’s the most common password EVERY year! Don’t use that password!

And as much as I want people to have good, strong passwords, I will be the one dissenting voice and ask that you not actually change it until Friday, after we have talked about what makes a good password. If you read the linked article, however, there is a very, very strong bit of foreshadowing regarding the discussion we’ll have.

And really – if you’re going to change it, change it to something good!

Way back in the the late ’70s and early ’80s, as PCs were becoming more popular as consumer devices, the programming language of the time was BASIC, which was an acronym for ‘Beginner’s All-Purpose Symbolic Instruction Code.’ It’s a cumbersome name, but it was the layman’s first exposure to programming and to what it could do, and it was easier to understand than the Assembly code that was used by serious programmers, and it’s even more understandable than the languages we have today such as C# (pronounced “C sharp”) and Java.

It used line numbers in front of every line, usually incremented by 10, so  program might look like:

10 print “Hello World!”;
20 GOTO 10

This program would print the phrase ‘Hello World’ over and over until you stopped it. If you needed to add a line between the two that comprise this program, you could preface it with any number between 11 and 19, but if you needed more than that you were in trouble.

BASIC programs could be very complex, as you can see here. In fact, one of the earliest graphics-capable adventure games ever created for the computer, back in 1979 and on an Apple IIe – while not looking like much – was created entirely in BASIC; it’s still considered a programming triumph. Back then we’d never seen anything like it, and it shows the power of the language in capable hands. You can see it in all its glory below.

However, if you are interested, you can experiment with BASIC programming yourself at the Quite Basic website. I’ll even give you a program to start with.

When you first visit the site, you’ll see a program already typed in, and if you’s like to see what it does you can hit the ‘play’ button right above the code window and it will draw some circles. Or, you can delete all the green code in the text window and type this instead:

10 input “What is your name?”; n
20 print “Well hello there, “; n; “!”

If you type this in the window, then hit the play button right above the window, you will be prompted for your name, and when you type it in it will respond with “Well hello there [you]!”.

You can experiment with it, the site is rich with information and examples, you can even create and save projects if you’re so inclined. The complex program I linked to earlier didn’t work quite right due to some compatibility issues, but I’m working through it to see if I can get it up and running.

We have talked a whole lot over the course of this semester about artificial intelligence; what it means, what it doesn’t mean, where it is, where it’s going, and it’s that last one that has caused us the most uncertainty. Remember, we don’t want a toaster that decided for us whether it will make our toast or not.

Now, writing in British publication The Independent, Hawking uses the current Johnny Depp film Transcendence as a jumping off point for his view that AI could be the biggest mistake humanity has ever made.

He worries that as we rush to create technology that can adapt to its environment, analyze gargantuan amounts of data in fractions of a second, and become self-aware, they will begin to form their own identities, their own societies, and their own needs for survival, of which humans may not play a part.

We have seen this theory played out countless times in many movies and works of fiction including I, Robot, I have No Mouth and I Must Scream, System Shock, The Terminator, 2001: A Space Odyssey, and many, many others.

Hawking doesn’t deny that there is some good in all of the developments we’re seeing, but he worries that things like Microsoft’s  Cortana and Apple’s Siri are just the beginning of an AI arms race that we will all lose.

There is an interesting sidebar in this article at DailyMail about the Hawking post, in which one of the founders of DeepMind, the company formed by a neuroscientist to develop machines that can think and was recently acquired by Google, stated that he feels “human extinction will happen and technology will likely play a part.” Google actually had to set up an ethics committee to monitor what Deep Mind is doing, although I suspect they will not be limited in any way.

I for one welcome our new toaster overlords. I hope they heard me. I love toast!

No more of this, hopefully.

Can it be? According to this article over on Ars Technica, it appears Cox Communications is going to be rolling out Gigabit service capabilities to all it’s residential customers! Fiber speeds, people.

HOWEVER, there are some serious caveats. First of all, it’s likely to be very expensive, at least in the beginning; some commenters suggesting around $300 a month, although I have no idea one way or the other.

This is from a Google fiber speed test, and it fills me with envy-based hate, but hopefully we’ll be closer.

The other thing is, and this is less of an issue, we’re not talking multi-gigabit speeds, only gigabit speeds. Still, that’s fiber-level, and it’s all we can have anyway since the DOCSIS specifications – protocols (remember those?) for sending data over pre-existing coaxial (remember that?) cable infrastructure – don’t allow for multi-gigabit data transmission with current consumer-level cable hardware such as cable modems. That type of hardware is only compatible with DOCSIS 3.0 which allows for gigabit speed, but it would need to support DOCSIS 3.1 to support multi-gigabit speed. But we don’t need that now anyway. Let’s not get greedy!

This is what I expect now, only without the tie.

Still, the fact they anticipate it will be available to all their customers in all their markets by the end of the year is an incredible start; I wasn’t aware of this plan and it seemed to come out of nowhere. I fully support it and hope that the full rollout will eventually drive the cost down and the availability of compatible hardware up.

Since I’ve been on a pseudo-historical bent with the posts this week, I thought I’d just go for broke and make a post about some interesting tech from the days of yore. This isn’t about ENIAC or the Analytical Engine, though, this is about the ever-forward march for convenience through consumer tech.

Below we have some attempts at navigation technology. One is in the form of a watch, and one is meant to be mounted in a car. Both have interchangeable maps that are like little scrolls – the auto-mounted one would advance according to the speed of the car, while the watch one had to be advanced by hand. You could buy maps for different locations and change them out as necessary. The car systems were developed in Bulgaria in the 1930s, while the watch, called the ‘RouteFinder,’ is from England and was developed a decade earlier in the 1920s.

Next, we have the original version of Google Glass, an over-the-eyes TV set, complete with dials and antenna. This was back in 1963, when there were only three channels and no color TV. Plus, you would need to sit very still otherwise the antenna would have a tough time doing their job. (On a related note, if you’re a fan of Google+, you may not be one for long).