Email From Strangers

I received a curious email today - an internal correspondence between a manager and some employees of a large Israeli travel agency, discussing a problem with billing some clients - including a screenshot from the internal ordering system, with the full details of a couple of credit cards, expiration dates, CVC numbers, personal details, etc. After the initial surprise, I guessed it was a typo error when filling the To: field in an email, and my name was autocompleted by mistake. I dealt with this agency once, about three (!) years ago, and so apparently was in the contacts list of the manager.

I responded with a somewhat cynical response informing about the mistake, and hoping that such a serious company would be more careful with my financial details as a customer. I received a quick response with an apology and an assurance my details are "out of reach of the systems' users". Oh, and the response began with - "Honorable DR,"...

Besides the humorous aspect, and the personal mistake made by the sender, such mistakes are inevitable, and are symptoms of the problem with the system, not the user. People will always make mistakes, and the design of the current email apps and the contacts autocompletion is that it is very easy to enter the wrong recipient - and hard to notice the error, especially when two people may have the same or similar names. Thus it is quite easy to sent some personal or sensitive internal communication to the outside world - and it's a mistake that might be impossible to undo. And in the specific case described above - I wonder why would my email even be in the autocompletion list, after a short communication three years ago?

Some solutions exists, but aren't sufficient or widespread at the moment.

One is to completely separate internal and external networks - to reduce the chance for information leak. This is used in security related organizations, but is very difficult to justify in most situations as internet access is critical in today's workspace. And it still does not prevent from sending an email to the wrong person in the organization (I remember quite a few such cases from my own service, ranging from highly classified information to very intimate conversations being misdirected).

A much more productive direction is for the system to give the sender a lot more information about the intended recipient, making spotting a mistake very easy at a glance - a thumbnail picture (like when sending a message in Facebook, also possible for internal organizational users), his/hers role or company name, and perhaps an infographic of how frequently are you communicating with that person.

I don't remember at the moment, but I read of some start-ups who have a product that enriches the email interface with lots of useful information about the recipients. And there's a Google Labs experiment called "Got the wrong Bob?" that tries to warn you if you choose a wrong recipient based on your usage patterns.

If you know of any existing solutions for this being employed, or have similar stories - you are welcomed to share...

Setting up - IKEA, Contacts and Tomato

I've been busy for the last few days. The non-computer related part was buying and assembling a bunch of IKEA furniture - surprisingly all my fingers are still intact and the things didn't fall apart yet...

I also found a little time to do one of those things that you know you should, bet never get to - I got all my contacts from the phones, gmail, facebook, linked-in, etc., merged them, cleaned up the phones and email info and put them in Google Contacts. This guide was quite helpful in the process. My only annoyance now is that I'm used to manage people on the phone by their Hebrew names, but on Contacts it's all in English, and I haven't thought of a good way to sync them.

I also finally set-up a WiFi network at the new appartment, so I can have internet without relying on the kindness of strangers with public wifi. Since my wifi router is a bit away from the computer, behind a couple of walls (I'll be splitting a neighbors internet connection) I wanted to make sure the signal is strong. This can be done by installing a custom firmware on the router called Tomato which gives you a lot of control over how your router works including transmission power. It also has a better GUI, nice graphs, and a bunch of tools and settings to play around with, such as prioritizing traffic by application (for example - giving VOIP traffic higher priority than p2p).

That's all for now, will be playing with some more stuff in the near future.

Email is for old people...

I've been chatting on Facebook with a distant cousin of mine who said she still didn't receive some link I was meant to send her. She was quite surprised when I told her I emailed it a week ago. "Email? You should have told me! That's for old people..." was more or less her reply.

When I think about it, my 12 years old brother doesn't use email much or at all, and most of his online communication is via facebook and chatting. Maybe as they get into university or corporate environment they will start using email, or mayble the world is changing and I'm now an old guy using email...

What are your experiences on this?

The Nook - Updates & Answers

This is a short update after playing around with the Nook for a while, and some answers to the comments on the previous post.

In general, I can say the Nook is a fun device, and serves its main purpose, reading books, quite well. It's very light and portable, simple to operate, and it's you can change the font size and style for easier reading. I even played a few games of chess on it (it has chess and sudoku apps) to pass the time and it was fun. It does feels somewhat sluggish or even stuck once in a while, and I had to turn it off and on a few times after it became unresponsive.

I also do not expect to use its WiFi connectivity much, given other options for internet access such as a mobile phone. Browsing is not a very fun activity (you can only interact with the site through the narrow touch screen on the bottom, and the eInk display is slow to redraw and not well suited for interactive display).

Also, you can't buy books from the device using the Barnes & Noble online store, since it will only sell a book if you have an US IP address due to distribution agreements with regional book publishers. The solution to that problem is to go through a proxy or VPN on the computer to access the B&N store, and then transfer the downloaded books to the Nook using a USB cable.

The next thing I tried was to load some documents on the Nook, both scans and regular PDF documents. They are resized to fit the screen and cannot be zoomed in, but 10pt font was just legible, so the Nook fits the purpose well enough and I'll be copying my documents to the Nook as well. To my surprise, it also correctly displayed the content of PDF files created from Hebrew documents, although Hebrew filenames were not correctly displayed.

Finally, when you'll have an eReader of your own, remember to download Calibre - a great open source ebook management software.

Going Paperless - The Next Generation

Continuing the previous post about my transition from paper to digital, today it's all about books.

As I've been traveling for more than half a year, I always carried a couple of books with me and would swap them with other travelers or in used-book stores. This way I've read many books without them taking much space or weight. Books do not become any less interesting with usage, and I usually have little value for the book itself standing on my shelf after I've read it, except perhaps it's availability in case I wish to read it again.

I've been thinking about this since I've returned, and so, as of this week I am the happy owner of the Nook eReader, made by Barnes & Noble (similar to Amazon's Kindle).

It uses the eInk technology to display a B&W screen for reading which requires very little power, and has an additional color touch screen below for navigation and keyboard. The Nook is light and portable, easy to read (the eyes do not get tired like when reading from a computer screen), has enough power for over a week of reading and can store thousands of books. It supports all common eBook formats, allows for microSD card for extra storage and even includes WiFi and a web browser (with a little hacking, it is even possible to use it's 3G connectivity in Israel).

This is now my own portable library, and the chances I'll be buying physical books in the futures are getting smaller. There is a huge variety of public and freely downloadable eBooks, while most new books in eBook format are sold for no more than 10$.

There are some nice extras - the Nook also displays images, PDFs (all my important documents are already scanned into PDFs) and plays audio files - which is great, since I love listening to audiobooks and they are a great way to pass the time when you're driving or on a long bus ride. And so, this little gadget will be my paper replacement for the future.