Hmmm …
Gervase Markham notices Facebook doing MITM attack on your email.:
Facebook silently inserted themselves into the path of formerly-direct unencrypted communications from people who want to email me. In other contexts, this is known as a Man In The Middle (MITM) attack. What on earth do they think they are playing at?
Today, as part of a national ad campaign, the Foundation for Individual Rights in Education placed a half-page ad in Michigan State University's student newspaper criticizing the university's absurdly overbroad spam policy:
The ad refers to the case of Kara Spencer, a student who, after sending a respectful and serious e-mail to select members of the faculty about the university's decision to reduce the school year by several days, was brought up on charges of spamming. She was then found guilty of spamming and had a formal 'Warning' placed in her file, potentially hurting her chances of obtaining employment or attending graduate school. After the intervention of FIRE and the Electronic Frontier Foundation, along with the support of eleven other civil liberties organizations, MSU withdrew the charges against Kara and promised to reform its spam policy. Unfortunately, the university has put in its place a new spam policy that is not much of an improvement. In fact, according to reports, an administrator admitted that Kara Spencer would still have been found guilty under the revised policy!
Take this very column that I’m writing. Moving thoughts from my head to your eyeballs requires three or four different communications systems. I write the column here in my word processor (1). I email it to an editor (2). He or she makes some changes and if they’re big enough, I get a phone call or a separate email and we talk them over as I make changes (3). It then goes from my editor’s desk to the Sun-Times’ webserver and the mysterious part of the operation that publishes it on paper (4).After Google Wave - the new way of doing things:
The Sun-Times Twitter (@suntimes http://www.twitter.com/suntimes) account broadcasts a link to the article when it’s been posted. I’ll probably re-Tweet it to my own 20,000 followers (@ihantko, http://www.twitter.com/ihnatko) which we’ll cal 5.
here’s how this column would be produced using Wave:
I have a browser window open that looks almost identical to my Google Mail window. I have an “inbox” of fresh Waves (well, if you must think of them as “messages” then go ahead … but I want my objection noted).
Just as with a conventional Inbox, the newest Waves are at the top. Waves with unread contents are highlighted in bold.
I click a button and create a new Wave. An empty editing pane opens on the side of the window, looking almost exactly like a new email message.
But it’s a rich-text editor that supports media and fancy formatting. I write my column. When I’m finally ready to give it to my editor — or at least ready for him to stop worrying that I’m only an hour from deadline and I still haven’t filed yet — I quietly drag his icon into the Wave.
Over at the Sun-Times, the Wave of this column appears in my editor’s Inbox, highlighted in bold. He clicks it to take a look.
Oh, damn. Technically, the Google Wave demo is only 80 minutes, not 90. I should have caught that error.
Before my editor’s very eyes, the “90” changes to “80.” The Wave is a “live” communication that I’m sharing with my editor any anybody else we choose to bring in. I’m still free to edit it. Finally satisfied that I have indeed crafted a Perfect Gem of flawless Truth, Beauty and Wisdom, I head over to the kitchen to fetch a celebratory Diet Dr. Pepper.
My editor quickly spots at least one line that causes grave concern: a sentence in which I intimate that Lars Rasmussen, Google Wave’s Software Engineering Manager has often been seen tramping out of a secluded wooded area carrying a shovel and a filthy empty burlap sack roughly large enough to stuff a whole human body in. He adds an instant message-like note: “It this true? Or are we going to get sued over a bad joke?”
I return to my office, beverage in hand. I note that the Wave containing this column is now in bold and at the top of my Inbox. I click and see his note. I add a threaded reply, also IM-style, sheepishly acknowledging that I was just having a bit of fun.
I see her typing him response to me, letter for letter. Good, he handled that well. Then I see the offending paragraph vanish.
(But how do you keep on top of all of these little conversations and changes? Each Wave has a timeline at the top. You can “reverse” or “fast-forward” through the timeline as though it was a YouTube video, witnessing the Wave change and evolve.)
My column has now been edited. My editor drags another participant into the Wave. This new guy is actually a little piece of software called a “robot,” located on a central server. The robot can now share in the process. This particular bot adds this article to the front page of the SunTimes.com site, without any of the private comments between me and my editor.
What?
Oh. Did I say that this software is called a “Widget”? No, no: it’s a “Robot.” Damn and blast. Well, I mean, it’s a day later and I’m at lunch with somebody besides. What can I do about it?
Well, I can get out my iPhone, open up my Wave client on the phone’s built-in web browser, and make the change. And come to think of it, I now have a really great screenshot of Wave in action. I drag it into the Wave right where I want it to appear.
My editor — who is still part of this particular Wave — sees it immediately in his Inbox.
Oh, and remember: the “put this on SunTimes.com” robot is part of the Wave. He sees that change, too. So my edits immediately reflected on the website. In fact, anybody who happened to have been reading the column at the time could see each of those changes being applied, at the very instant that I was making them, one at a time.
They can’t change the article themselves, of course (anarchy!) but there’s an unbroken pipeline between myself, my editor, and SunTimes.com.
Wave defines the standards, the architecture, and the mechanisms for making the above example happen. In fact, even the “Google Mail-like window” I described isn’t Wave. It’s merely the way that Google has implemented its own standards into something useful.
One of my favorite quotations in Grown Up Digital is the teenager explaining that he preferred to use some form of instant messaging rather than e-mail. He explained that e-mail was a more formal technology and is what he would use if he had to send a thank you note to a friend’s mother.
So I’m not surprised that a new report from the Pew Internet and American Life Project shows that teens ages 12-17 use instant messaging more than any other age group. Fully 68 percent of this age group send instant messages, and youth 18-32 are just a bit lower at 59 percent. But after that the numbers plummet with increased age. Only 23 percent of older boomers age 55-63 used instant messaging.
“Teens really gravitate to these instant forms of communication,” according to a Pew research assistant quoted in Adweek. “They’re not likely to be sitting around waiting for e-mail.”
Only 73 percent of the 12-17 group uses email, which is a large drop from the 89 percent recorded in 2005. It is also the lowest use of any age group sampled.
When I say “Net Generation” I’m referring to those born between the years 1977 to 1997. That means young people ages 12-32. But the Pew study broke this age group into two groups: 12-17 and 18-32. In a couple of cases the difference between the two groups is significant. While 78 percent of the 12-17 group play games online, this number drops to 50 percent for those 18-32. But 72 percent of adults 18-32 watch videos online, while the number drops to 57 percent for 12-17. Otherwise the numbers are fairly similar for activities such as using social networking or downloading music.
Every time I take a vacation, the day before I return to the office is tinged with regret for taking time off. I enjoyed my time off, oh yes. But I know that when I come back, I'm going to have to tame the email beast. I always set my OOF message before I go. I add recurring all-day events to my calendar for the days that I'm gone. I have to admit that I do check my email at least a couple of times while I'm gone, but I don't read it nearly as much as when I'm in the office. In January, after the holidays and Macworld Expo, many people have this collective fear.
I've adopted a few strategies in Entourage that help me get through all of that email. First, I check everything by priority to make sure that there's nothing in there marked urgent or that is flagged, and deal with those from most recent to least recent. If I've been gone for awhile, I've found that items that were marked urgent but sent more than a couple of weeks ago have usually resolved themselves, often by the sender following up with someone specified by my OOF message.
Next, I take care of my calendar invites, to make sure that no-one has scheduled something for me early in my return. There's always someone who schedules a meeting with me a couple of hours into my first day back, and I'd rather that they get a response from me instead of radio silence.
Then, I sort my inbox by sender. Some senders are more important than others —-- for example, emails from my manager are the most important ones. This also lets me delete all of those Facebook emails that arrived over my break. I get a lot of email for stuff that I need to do, but those tasks are often pretty quick, so this usually lets me pick off those low-hanging fruit quickly and easily.
After I've done this, I sort my inbox by conversation. Next, I scan through them and prioritise the conversations. Some of that is simply by reading subject lines. Also, I usually check conversations with lots of responses first. Then, I read the most recent email in that conversation. This often means that the whole email thread has been taken care of by the time that I got back, so I can just delete all of the emails in that conversation.
Between these, I've usually deleted lots of emails, and dealt with the highest-priority and easiest-to-handle stuff. Now it's time to really dig in. I have a lot of projects going on at once, so the next thing that I do is sort my inbox by category. I have an extensive address book, and all of the senders in there are categorised, so the vast majority of what ends up in my inbox already has a category (if you're not like me and don't like that, you can turn it off). I start off with the email that isn't categorised and take care of it as quickly as I can. Then I decide which of the categories is the most important, and I work through those emails. I tend to work from most recent to least recent for long vacations (more than a couple of weeks), and the reverse for short vacations. And so on and so forth, until I reach the goal of Inbox Zero (no emails at all in my inbox).
Some of Merlin's key points:
