“It’s a dot and a dash to have a conversation with the entire world.”

You are a man of brilliance, L.L.. I actually wish this were a real feature.

From its creators, Martin Wattenberg and Fernanda Viegas:

An invisible, ancient source of energy surrounds us—energy that powered the first explorations of the world, and that may be a key to the future.

This map shows you the delicate tracery of wind flowing over the US right now.

(via Khoi Vinh)

Facebook and Google and Yahoo and Microsoft can have the best encryption and security protocols in the world, but that doesn’t mean anything if your password is “shinyobjects321″.  It may be easy for you to remember, but it’s also easy to guess.  And, chances are, you use it for every account you have.  Sound familiar?

So, please, do these three simple things and feel much safer about the security of your accounts.

Enable Facebook’s Security Features

Facebook has gone ahead and made this one real easy.  Your password could even be sub-par and you still have a great way of securing your account.

Step One. Visit your Facebook Account Settings page.

Step Two. Under “Account Security” enable all of those nifty check boxes (except the 3rd, unless you want to).

The first box forces Facebook to encrypt all data it transmits from your computer over the Internet.  You’ll notice your URL switch to “https://” and nice friendly notification from your browser that you’re surfing securely.  How nice.  This is key if you’re accessing Facebook in a public area, like a coffee shop.  It’s amazing how easy it is to ‘sniff packets’ on a public network. That’s for another post.

The second and third notify you by email and phone, respectively, when you (or someone) log into your account from a new device.  When you log in from a library computer, for example, you enter your password and then name the computer you’re on.  That way, even if someone knows your password, Facebook will notify you when the account logs in.  You can revoke access from devices at any time.

The final one is the best, but possibly the least convenient. When you log into your account from a friend’s computer, or any other device that hasn’t been previously authorized, you will receive a text message with a short code in it that must be entered before accessing the site.  If you always have your phone, this is easy.  If you never have you phone, don’t check it.  If you’re missing or have lost your phone, you’ll need to log in to a previously authorized computer and change your number or disable the feature.

Step Three. Check your list of authorized applications. It’s not a bad idea to clear out the ones you don’t remember or don’t care about.  Keep a handle on what and who has access to your Facebook details and account.

The point of this is to protect your bad password from wreaking havoc on your privacy.  However, if you do not enable the “two-step verification” by checking the fourth box, someone can still access your account if they know your password – you’ll just find out about it.

Wasn’t that easy?  Well, it gets a bit more complicated from here.

Enable Google’s Two-Step Verification

Google was the first major email provider and online service to provide simple two-step verification to all its customers.  The first step if your password, same as always. The second step is a 6-digit code generated by a piece of software on your phone, called Google Authenticator.

If you’ve ever worked as a government employee or in a company that has little key fob security tokens, this is no different.  Instead of an annoying keychain, it’s app for your iPhone, Blackberry or Android.  You can also have the token texted to you, or Google will call and read it to you.

Step One. Visit your Google Account settings page.  Click “Enable Two-Step Verification” and set up the account with your phone number.  Download the necessary application to your phone, and you’re all set.  Take note of the set of tokens Google has generated in the event you lose your phone.  Place them in a password-protected cloud storage system…or, a desk drawer.

Step Two. This is the part that can be a little annoying at first, but once it’s set up you’ll be fine.  Each application that accesses your Google account must have a new password.  Google has made managing these passwords very easy.  If you use an email client, access your email from your phone, gchat from a chat client, etc, you must create special passwords for each application.  It will take you ten minutes, but is well worth the effort.

Step Three. When accessing Google from a new device, you’ll be asked to enter that security token from your phone.  If you’ve lost your phone, Google provided you a set of tokens that you should have kept handy.  Where are they?  Or, just access your account from a previously authorized device.

If you stop and think for a moment about the information available from your Google account, this security feature doesn’t seem as inconvenient.  We routinely receive emails from banks, family, business and others that contain information that could easily be used to piece together a very comprehensive picture of our lives.  Feigning ignorance is no longer an option.

Start Using Password Management Software

There are some wonderful browser plugins and software packages that will take care of remembering your passwords for you.  I use 1Password, for example.  LastPass is also very popular.  Password management software allows you to use long, random digit passwords for your websites without the hassle of remembering them.  The password files themselves are encrypted and locked behind a master password.  Of course, that one password had better be good and I hope you change it every once in a while.

Aside from remembering your passwords, 1Password will remember your personal and bank information for easy completion on web forms.  When it’s type to create a password, it will auto-suggest one that is very strong, then save it for later use.  There are plugins for all major web browsers, and a standalone software package to manage everything easily.  With an application for your phone, you have access to it even when you’re on a friend’s computer.

I think I sound a little paranoid. Perhaps that’s a fair point.  In reality, I think it’s just about using common sense.  You don’t need a 28-character password for every little site you sign on to.  A password generator will happily suggest a pronounceable, 8-letter password that is just as good for that antiques forum you like.

However, in a day when more of our information is moving to the cloud and our lives’ small details are available with a few clicks, little emphasis has been put on the one thing locking most of it away – your password.  Don’t be caught off-guard with a dinky childhood pet’s name and yell at the Internet for being unsafe.  Yell at yourself for having a terrible password.

Dave and I were terribly unsuccessful in our attempts to eliminate communications devices from our lives every Sunday, lasting only a month before just giving up.  Oddly, it wasn’t because we needed to reach out to others, it was because we felt the pressure to be plugged in was simply too great.  We were missing out on something, we were sure of it.  What if friends wanted to go out?  What if there was a breaking news story that we weren’t even remotely involved in but obviously HAD to know about?  Were we letting friends down by not being available all the time?  I think we were pretty surprised at the feelings raised by this challenge.

I’ve always been an advocate of technology as a means to connect people through communication.  Whether it’s breaking down social, geographic or economic barriers, information communications technologies (ICTs) have provided enormous benefits to society.  But, what I came to LSE to study is how these technologies have changed the way we converse with one another, not just the media we use to do it.

Sherry Turkle, Professor of the Social Studies of Science and Technology at MIT, spoke at LSE this week on the topic and it prompted me to write a little more about it.  I read her book, Alone Together, this spring and enjoyed her qualitative research through interviews and analysis of personal communications in the United States.  She was once noted as an evangelist of the positive power of ICTs in society, but today says something is “amiss” and we would be wise to take a closer look at how shifts in conversation are affecting society as a whole.  It is a collection of corrections to the “heroic narratives” of the Internet – “the effusions of digital evangelists who confuse technological advance with human progress.”

We insist that our world is increasingly complex, yet we have created a communications culture that has decreased the time available for us to sit and think uninterrupted.  As we communicate in ways that ask for almost instantaneous responses, we don’t allow sufficient space to consider complicated problems. (176)

Avoidance of the telephone because it’s “too intimate”, demands to answer complex questions via email with a simple ‘yes’ or ‘no’, punting of sensitive discussion in favour of passive action on social networks and texting – all of these trends are thoroughly discussed by Turkle and given appropriate substantiation from interviews with teens and businessmen and parents alike.

At times, I’ve read aloud paragraphs to friends sitting nearby and each has related their own stories of frustration and remorse at how they used to, or would like to, communicate.  It’s as if we’ve placed this collective pressure on each other to communicate as a means of satisfaction instead of proper discourse; confusing frequency and rapidity for progress and quality of discussion.

Turkle interviewed a high school student in New Jersey (emphasis my own):

“If I’m upset, right as I feel upset, I text a couple of my friends … just because I know that they’ll be there and they can comfort me. If something exciting happens, I know that they’ll be there to be excited with me, and stuff like that. So I definitely feel emotions when I’m texting, as I’m texting…. Even before I get upset and I know that I have that feeling that I’m gonna start crying, yeah, I’ll pull up my friend … uh, my phone … and say like … I’ll tell them what I’m feeling, and, like, I need to talk to them, or see them.”

After Julia sends out a text, she is uncomfortable until she gets one back: “I am always looking for a text that says, ‘Oh, I’m sorry,’ or ‘Oh, that’s great.’” Without this feedback, she says, “It’s hard to calm down.” Julia describes how painful it is to text about “feelings” and get no response: “I get mad. Even if I e-mail someone, I want the response, like, right away.  I want them to be, like, right there answering me. And sometimes I’m like, ‘Uh! Why can’t you just answer me?’ . . . I wait, like, depending on what it is, I wait like an hour if they don’t answer me, and I’ll text them again. ‘Are you mad? Are you there? Is everything okay?’” Her anxiety is palpable. (184)

What is this altered discourse doing to our ability to relate to one another and form relationships based on intimate conversation and trust – especially in a world in which our conversations and sharing are mediated on a platform whose creator believes that privacy is a discourse of the past?  This desire to alleviate pain and fear with reciprocated concern from friends is obviously not new, but if the first reaction in times of difficulty is to reach to others for superficial expressions of concern instead of coping internally and finding the strength within, what is that doing to our sense of self?

I, like Turkle, am not a technological determinist and do not believe that technology is forcing us to change the way we communicate – it’s simply enabling us to give in to our basic human impulses without regard for the larger picture.  We sacrifice internal deliberation and self-awareness for the immediate satisfaction provided by constant communication with others.  Examples are everywhere, from business to friends to relationships.

While the social pressures of giving up these devices and networks is not realistic for many of us, we can change the way we communicate and do what we can to engage others in less fragmented forms of discussion in favour of more meaningful expressions of friendship and connectedness.

Perhaps that should be the challenge after all – don’t give it up, just change the way you use it.

Updated: The podcast of her lecture is now available.

More from Professor Turkle:
TEDx Talk at UIUC – A very brief version of the talk she gave at LSE
Andrew Keen interviews Turkle – Well-known cyber-skeptic Andrew Keen questions Turkle on privacy
Who Am We? – Wired magazine article on faceted identities from 1996

Photo: Jean-Baptiste Labrune (on Flickr!)

I suppose I’m a bit used to this, though.  Google Latitude, an app in my browser and iPhone, has been tracking my location since it was released.  I’ve enabled it and disabled periodically, but it has a rather detailed history of my precise movements since June 2010 (yet another reason I use two-step verification on my Google account).  It’s not public, and I don’t broadcast it.  My immediate family uses it and that’s it – my Mom calls it her Weasley Clock, after the magical device from the Harry Potter series.

It’s the personal uses for data like this that interest me.  I’m the guy that imports his Foursquare check-ins into his Google Calendar (and I’m not alone), geotags his photographs and keeps a detailed calendar that covers over a decade of events.  Aren’t we all moving toward behavior like this?  Our thoughts are increasingly on public display, our Facebook conversations with friends recorded for eternity (it seems) and our seemingly innocuous tweets will be studied by researchers far in the future.  Every time we check-in, comment, update or broadcast, the location of our devices is recorded and sometimes broadcast along with it.  It wouldn’t be hard to take an active social media user’s profiles and pin their locations to a map.

I’m not defending Apple’s collection of this information, though.  And, if it comes out that they were collecting it or transmitting it, they’ll have a rather large problem.  But, for the moment, it’s an interesting look into the data collected by our devices and the trust we place in their makers.  It appears as though the data isn’t even all that precise, having been pulled from cell tower triangulation instead of GPS.  What’s more, it’s a good example of how programmers and geeks are ferreting out the little programming nuances that the rest of us are unable to find ourselves.  It’s like a crowd sourced system of checks and balances!

Here’s a snapshot of the data collected by my iPhone since July 2010, when I installed iOS 4 and, unknowingly, this little iPhone tracker.

Copyright law in the United States is terribly antiquated and anti-innovation.  The first copyright law in the US was passed in 1790 to protect “maps, charts and books” for a period of 14 years.  That was it.  You couldn’t extend it, music wasn’t covered and they stupidly forgot to write a provision about online file sharing. Today, worldwide brands like Mickey Mouse are used to extend copyright terms that currently last for the life of the author + 70 years, or 120 years from the publishing of a corporate creation.  And just about everything falls under copyright.

Why does this matter? Well, if a television show is copyrighted in the United States, it can’t be shown elsewhere in the world without a specific licensing agreement in that country.  With protection from legislation like the Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA), websites like Hulu.com only stream content within the United States.  Bummer for my weekly Glee and Modern Family fix.  They know where I’m located because of the IP address my computer is assigned when I connect to the Internet.  The software code is implementing legal code to block my access to content and flashes a big copyright notice instead of auto-tuned quasi-teenagers prancing on a high school stage.  Every time you post a funny video on Facebook that falls within the licensing wall, I want to punch you in the face.

How do we get around this?  We fake it – and it’s really easy.  A VPN, or ‘virtual private network’, creates a connection with another computer in the world and allows you to piggyback off of its connection to the Internet, among other uses.  You probably use one to access your work email from home.  I use it to watch TV.  Who wins here?

Astrill is a service offering the simplest method of using a VPN to pretend you’re in the United States, or Canada, or somewhere in Europe.  It’s pretty shameless in advertising its use to watch Hulu and other sites for TV.  It’s fast, it always works, and you can change your location on the fly.  Scranton was a little slow last night, so I hopped over to Seattle and then to Los Angeles.  Cheapest way to fly – only $20 for 3 months.

Using a VPN is fun for other reasons.  You can trick location-based services like Twitter, geo-targeted advertising,  and trip Google’s fraud sensors.  Check who is showing ads on CNN.com in Detroit or San Francisco or Berlin.  Endless fun….[nerd].  You can also use it for security purposes and evade snoopers and network restrictions placed on you by your office or school.

So, if you’re like me and are missing out on your US-based TV shows or other content, do yourself a favor and get a VPN instead of wasting your time and eyesight on megavideo or casttv.  There are bigger discussions to be had here about Internet barriers, content regulation and anonymity on the web, but I have a new episode of The Office to catch up on.  See you in Scranton.

Full disclosure: I will get a cut of your subscription if you sign up using the links above, but you get 10% off.  Win-win.

I’ve long wondered if there would be some major shift in the way people operate online – away from the “share all” culture to a “share a little” mentality – or at least to “share with a few” policy.  Software code originally forced us to share with everyone and we accepted it.  Then they let us scale it down to “friend lists” but it has been slow to catch on.  Now, we’re seeing the anti-social networks emerge.  The first I’ve actually liked is Path, released today.

Path lets you share “moments” with a maximum of 50 people.  These “moments” are photos with context: what, who and where.  That’s it.  It is its stunning simplicity and elegance that I think will separate it from the immediate demise of so many other social network wannabes.

I don’t know if Path will go anywhere.  It has significant backing, including Dave Morin and Shawn Fanning.  If nothing more, it’s an interesting look into building social networking applications that ascribe to some sort of anthropological belief of how networks are created and maintained.  Someone should also study the emotional dilemma created by making room for new members of your personal network once you hit 50.  DRAMA!

Why 50? Robin Dunbar is a British anthropologist that you may have read about in Gladwell’s Tipping Point.  Dunbar theorizes that humans are not capable of maintaining “stable inter-personal relationships” with over 150 people…and that’s the absolute maximum (plus or minus a few).  Further, personal networks really only include 50 people.  That’s the simple version.  This is a complex topic.

I love Apple and am almost always in awe of the work they do.  But doesn’t this seem like a big leap from what was originally built to control the stability of mobile applications into control of our computer’s software?  Jobs says that of course the App Store will be one of many ways users can install software and that it won’t be locked down…yes.

However, I don’t think it’s unreasonable to imagine a day when developers will opt to cut distribution and transaction costs and rely on Apple’s built-in store to make it easier for their customers.  Then Apple gains control of the hardware, the operating system and the distribution method of the software run on its computers.  Are the possible costs of this system more important than the ease and convenience gained?  Fostering a community of developers is important, for sure.  But will it cost them creative license?

I remember when Apple prominently featured its “Downloads” page so that their developers had a prime showcase for their software.  It has received less love each year and there are some fears that it will be shelved in preparation for the new App Store – a highly controlled and vertically integrated stepchild.

Alarmist?  Yes.  But, perhaps cautionary.  I hope it’s just a knee-jerk reaction and that this fear isn’t realized.

Have you ever been walking down the sidewalk or standing in a square and wondered what you were looking at?  Perhaps a bit about the architecture, the history of a particular building, or whether that restaurant with that great happy hour deal is in fact any good?

Enter Augmented Reality.  These applications for iPhone, Android and others use the phone’s camera, GPS, accelerometer and compass to overlay graphical information on the live camera view.  Hold the camera up to the building, and peer through the looking glass to reveal the dense world of information behind it.

On my way home from the gym yesterday, I stopped in Trafalgar Square to give acrossair a spin…literally.  See my photos below with Wikipedia entries floating about.  You can also display Yelp reviews, bars, subways and more.  Really incredible stuff.  I look forward  to (read: dread) wearing contact lenses that do the same thing in a few years.

Many of these stupid mistakes are the result of a failure to understand where these messages go, who sees them and how long they sit around on servers for retrieval. Here are a few tips to securing your conversations and some common pitfalls in leaked communications.

Secure your Gmail
When you’re using WiFi, especially one that’s publicly available, someone can eavesdrop on your web surfing with surprising ease.  That includes your email, downloaded files and websites.  If you see the padlock icon on your browser, it means the website you’re visiting is transmitting that information securely – banks, e-commerce and most login pages are secure.  But, most email websites are not.

In Gmail, click on ‘Settings’ and set ‘Browser Connection’ to ‘Always use HTTPS‘.  This forces Gmail to transmit your data securely every time.  Phew, emails and juicy gchats secure.  Glad that’s done.

Go ‘Off the Record’
Google Talk, or gchat, swiftly brought about the end of AOL Instant Messenger’s reign when Google folded it into Gmail.  Aside from being more convenient, an ‘improvement’ in gchat involves saving every conversation you have for eternity.  I can’t even imagine how much fun it would be to read through a database of gchats.  What a treasure trove.

Make it your policy to “Go off the record” in every chat.  Once you initiate OTR, it stays on for every future conversation you have with that person until you turn it off.  This guarantees that the conversation is not stored in your account or theirs.  Also, it adds great emphasis to what you’re about to say.

Note: If they’re connecting to Google Talk with a third-party program, however, the chat may be stored on their computer.  Foiled.

Watch your BBM and PIN use
I can’t count the number of times I’ve been told by friends and colleagues that they prefer to communicate via BlackBerry Messenger and the internal “PIN” system because its untraceable and no one can read it.  This is not true.  If your BlackBerry is owned by your employer, every message sent and received over BBM is stored on the company’s server and easily retrieved by the system administrator.  Every company has different policies regarding this information, but never be fooled into thinking that what you do online and on your berry is ever secret.  (Update: The Supreme Court on Dec 14th granted cert to a case from a federal appeals court in California that will determine whether text messages sent by an employee on a company device are considered ‘private’.)

Encrypted Emails
You can encrypt the emails you send with FireGPG and a handy Firefox plugin for Gmail.  It’s burdensome to set up, but once you’ve exchanged public keys with the people you want to email with securely, the encryption happens in the background and the message cannot be read by anyone without the key.  Iranian revolutionaries are using it to coordinate protests and the public keys used to unlock emails that could be evidence are at the center of some court cases.

Even though these technologies exist, they really only protect against people eavesdropping on your conversation or intercepting your messages.  If the person you’re communicating with isn’t trustworthy and will just give up all that info…well, then…you’re pretty much screwed.  This post will self-destruct in….5….