Josh Mehlman

For some time, I have been trying to find a case for my iPhone which provides a degree of protection for the screen. I have been known to put the phone in the same pocket as keys or coins and would prefer not to crack or deeply scratch the display. But for some reason, almost all iPhone cases are only concerned with protecting the back of the phone, leaving the more delicate screen vulnerable.

I don’t get it.

But after a lengthy comparison of iPhone cases online and at a local retailer, I found one which seemed to fit the bill: the Belkin Light Protect Rock (or LightProtectRock), also known as the Shield Flex, for 40 bucks.

First off, let’s clarify why you might need to protect the iPhone screen.

Read the rest of this entry →

In the past five years there’s been a steady stream of social networking platforms du jour which then fell out of favour with geeky early adopters as as the great unwashed discovered them – from MySpace to Facebook to Twitter.

All the while, LinkedIn sat around gradually building momentum without any of the fanfare or media hype. Recruiters loved it, if only for its ability to fill quotas on candidate lists. But the developers also pulled in a few ideas from here and there – groups, events, marketing, status updates – OK, they nicked it all from Facebook and Twitter.

As a result, people looking to network for business – not to share pictures of kids and cats – have been coming back to LinkedIn and thinking, ‘Hey, this is pretty good!’ And LinkedIn gave them somewhere to put all their relevant career and skills information, which is a lot harder to do on Twitter.

Last week I hosted an online seminar with Karen Moloney from Get Me Learning Resources and Faye Hollands from Outshine Consulting. Karen took us through the nuts and bolts of promoting yourself and your business while Faye told us how she had used and benefited from it. And as usual, there were heaps of cracking questions from the audience.

If you’re dead keen to find out more, you can read Karen’s helpful handout notes or watch a recording of the webinar (though you will have to fill in your details to get it).

Pity the poor people of Albury-based transport company Border Express. On Friday they posted an innocent job ad looking for a developer with SQL Server and Visual Basic experience. But over the weekend, some wiseguy who had access to the company’s account details on Seek made a couple of sneaky changes. To the required skills, the miscreants added “”DD cup breasts, slim waist, tight twat” and a willingness to undergo “a pre-employment strip search to ensure they meet the requirements of the position”.

Sure, it’s one way to attract a lot of attention to an otherwise dull job ad, but everyone from female job hunters to company management was not impressed. The company and police are looking into it.

In Melbourne’s western suburbs a transport company employee was killed after a server fell on him while it was being unloaded from a truck. He reportedly saw the 200kg fridge-sized machine coming loose from a forklift and decided he would try to save it.

It wouldn’t be the first time someone put their body on the line to try and save an expensive piece of gear. With photographers, for instance, there’s a strong instinct to save the camera even while risking their own health, or body parts. But no matter how expensive the gadget, chances are a limb – or a life – are much harder to replace.

Just about everyone I know thinks the government’s plan to legislate mandatory internet filtering is a really bad idea.

This could lead me to believe the majority of Australians are as passionate about internet censorship as me and my friends. But then I remember that most of my friends are university educated, left-leaning types who work in journalism or the IT industry.

This same selection bias is at work in the online community, particularly on Twitter. The sort of people who use Twitter, who blog, who read the IT media are precisely the sort of people who would oppose internet censorship.

This has led many people to believe if they make enough noise about it online, the Government will drop the filter. Unfortunately, this greatly overestimates the importance and influence of Twitter and social media generally when it comes to real-world politics.

Even an infinite number of angry posts on Twitter, sarcastic blog posts and articles in the IT press would still have no effect on Government policy. Politicians only care about who can deliver them blocs of votes in important electorates.

Onine fame is fleeting, but mine was the top article on ABC's The Drum for a little while

As I argue on ABC’s The Drum blog, so far the Christian lobby – which is for the filter – is doing this a lot better than the disparate anti-filter coalition.

This is not to say the anti-censorship campaign is doomed. However, it needs to focus less on preaching to the choir and more on real-life, professional political lobbying.

It’s a big ask, particularly because many of the anti-censorship groups have little experience in direct political action. But it must be done if we are to convince the Government of the immense folly and dire (supposedly) unintended consequences of its current plans.

In covering the ongoing AFACT v iiNet case in the Federal Court, local journalists such as The Australian’s Andrew Colley and ZDNet’s Liam Tung have caused some controversy by live tweeting from within the courtroom. While broadcast journalists in Australia are not allowed to report from inside courtrooms, the Federal Court has decided it’s up to individual judges if they want to allow live coverage on Twitter.

In the same spirit, yesterday I called Toshiba tech support for help on a very minor issue with my laptop. Ideally I would have preferred to email a question and then get annoyed when no one responded (59% of companies don’t respond to email queries, you know). But Toshiba doesn’t give you the option; just a phone number and a postal address. So I called, and it quickly became apparent I wasn’t going to get anywhere fast. Because I had nothing better to do while waiting on hold, I started Tweeting: Read the rest of this entry →

Another yarn I wrote for CRN, this time on Telstra’s consumer ISP BigPond redirecting mistyped domain name queries to a branded error page. In other words, you type google.coj in your browser and rather than receiving your browser’s standard error page, you get redirected to a BigPond page that gives you helpful suggestions – maybe google.com? – but also ads and pay-per-click links.

On one side of the argument are the techies, who dislike Telstra messing with the way the domain name system is supposed to operate, albeit only within BigPond’s network. Whether they dislike this for reasons of technical purity, or because Telstra will make money out of it, is highly debatable. I suppose there’s also a slippery slope argument to be made; if BigPond makes this change to how DNS works, what’s to stop it from redirecting, say, iinet.net.au to bigpond.com or an error page?

The other side of the argument is that Telstra provides helpful, contextual information that more easily gets people where they want to go. (Though if this were purely altruistic, you wouldn’t have any ads or paid links on the page, presumably.) As long as an ISP delivers this service transparently, honestly and with an opt-out (all true in this case), where’s the problem?

Online glory is fleeting, but I would like to point out that for a couple of hours this morning, mine was the top tech story on Google News for Australia.

Yay me!

The delightful Things Bogans Like blog recently went out on a limb and suggested a number of things bogans will like in the near future, and number one was Twitter.

In the past 18 months, the new bogan has belatedly made the switch from MySpace to Facebook as its social networking website of choice. This has caused trendsetters to start making the switch from Facebook over to Twitter. Once the bogan realises that there are celebrities on Twitter, and that no interaction on there is more than 140 characters in length, it will be unable to resist the appeal of broadcasting its every move to its friends via its phone or computer. Even better, the 140 character limit is something that bogans have been training for for years, via generally unintelligible text message abbreviations. The trendsetters, meanwhile, will migrate elsewhere, galled by the flood of tweeted rubbish that the bogan will bring.

Meanwhile Jodee Rich, founder of failed telco One.Tel, has handed the Australian Securities and Investments Commission a can of legal whoop-ass and is now free to be a company director again.

ABC radio’s Deborah Cameron asked Rich what his next venture might be and, some would say predictably, he spoke excitedly about the enormous potential of social media.

One can only imagine the horrors this may unleash on the social media landscape. It could make a plague of bogans seem like a mild irritation. But at least we might see the long-awaited resurrection of the One.Tel dude (see right).

The question is, if Twitter (and social media) become uninhabitable for techno-hipsters, where will they go next?

Here’s a write-up I did for CRN on six leading iPhone apps developed by Australian companies. Mobile apps are a booming area worldwide and, without resorting to parochialism, Australians are doing some really good work and in some cases leading their fields.

Speaking of mobile, here’s a quick story I wrote for iTnews about local firm Digislide scoring $18 million in funding from UK investors. Digislide makes pocket-sized video/data projectors, which are just astounding. I’m not that old, but I can remember when the smallest video projector was the size of a large suitcase and had to be carried by two people.

But is it at all surprising that Digislide had to go overseas to get the money?

There’s a range of Twitter phishing scams doing the rounds currently. You don’t have to tell me – I get at least one scam-tastic direct message every day! Lord knows how many you’d get if you had thousands of followers.

How it works

The mechanism is pretty simple. You get a direct message from someone you follow, encouraging you in some way to click a link. The techniques used to get you to click are the clever bit.

So you click on the link and it looks legit. Except it asks you to provide your Twitter ID and password. Obviously this is a bad idea. Well, I say ‘obviously’, but it’s not so obvious because heaps of people get caught. Even people who make a living on their social media expertise. Whoopsie!

Once you provide your password, the nasty scammers can log into your Twitter account and send direct messages to all your friends, supposedly from you, asking them to click on the link. Or possibly several different links, with several different enticements. A few of your friends fall for it and the cycle continues.

Presumably the hijackers could also use your details to send Tweets, supposedly from you, for various nefarious spammy purposes.

Clever enticements

As I mentioned, the clever part is the way the scammers convince you to click the link, what security geeks call ’social engineering’. It needs to sound like a plausible message you’d receive from a friend or someone you know, the enticement needs to be appealing to you and the link needs to look legitimate.

These started out fairly basic: things like ‘Hey, take this free quiz’ or ‘Hey. Can u do this for me?’ The ‘hey’ part makes it sound like a genuine message from a friend. In fact, the only thing that tipped me off was the fact that the message came from someone I didn’t know particularly well and it seemed overly familiar. If it had been from a real-life friend, I might easily have been fooled.

The next phase was an IQ test, with messages like ‘Want to check to see whos iq is higher?’ and ‘u seem smart. take this iq quiz.’ Appealing to people’s competitiveness and vanity always gets you places.

Today I received a direct message telling me someone had found me on a site called ‘xsgay’. You can imagine this would be of great concern to quite a lot of people, regardless of their personal preferences. And once you’re worried and not thinking clearly, you’re much less likely to fret about why this site is asking for your Twitter details, and just fill them in. Uh oh!

What (not) to do

As far as I understand, these scams have a fairly low success rate because they rely on you entering your ID and password, or at least clicking a link to provide those details to the scam site. But like spam and online banking phishing scams, a low success rate multiplied by millions of messages adds up to a sufficient number of people who get fooled.

So not getting caught out is fairly simple:

1. Be suspicious of people contacting you at random – if it’s outside the normal pattern of behaviour, question it
2. Don’t click suspicious links
3. Don’t provide your ID or password to a site unless you know it’s trustworthy
4. If your account gets hijacked, change your password as soon as you find out. And probably start apologising to a lot of people.

OK, that was quick! I’ve posted my first freelance story for iTnews: Government on track for $1bn ICT savings: Tanner.

Soon after it was elected the Rudd Government asked UK public-sector efficiency expert Sir Peter Gershon to examine how the government and public service used information technology. This review, completed in August 2008, estimated the Government could save about $1 billion over four years just by rationalising its ‘business-as-usual’ or day-to-day IT spending. All this, apparently, without having to fire lots of people or reduce the number of IT services or the quality of delivery. (The Gershon review also cures warts and reunites long-lost lovers.)

This hasn’t gone without hiccups: Gershon estimated the Government would save $140 million in the first year, which turned out to be more like $109 million in reality. But with round one already in train, the government is pressing ahead with round two.

If it all works, in about four years’ time, the budget will be $1 billion leaner. Or $500 million at least, because half the savings will be put back into more IT stuff, which will generate more efficiency. Before you know it, the whole of government IT will be run on a couple of recycled desktops running Ubuntu!