Michael Glenn's Blog

Path, Privacy and Permission

mglenn — Wed, 08 Feb 2012 04:35:12 +0000

Earlier today Arun Thampi published his investigation into data uploaded by the iPhone application Path. Arun was participating in a hackathon when he noticed Path making an API call that indicated it was submitting a contact from his phone. Upon further inspection it was determined that Path had uploaded his entire address book to their servers.

Dave Morin the CEO of Path quickly responded on Arun’s blog when negative sentiment started spreading online about Path’s contact uploading.

“Arun, thanks for pointing this out. We actually think this is an important conversation and take this very seriously. We upload the address book to our servers in order to help the user find and connect to their friends and family on Path quickly and effeciently as well as to notify them when friends and family join Path. Nothing more.

We believe that this type of friend finding & matching is important to the industry and that it is important that users clearly understand it, so we proactively rolled out an opt-in for this on our Android client a few weeks ago and are rolling out the opt-in for this in 2.0.6 of our iOS Client, pending App Store approval.

Dave Morin

Co-Founder and CEO of Path”

The general sentiment on Twitter at least is that Path shouldn’t be doing this or at the very least should be asking user’s permission before uploading their entire address book. I don’t know Dave but it appears from his swift response and continued response on Twitter that this was not a nefarious use of data and truly was designed to enhance the user experience. Dave seems like a stand-up guy and Path will weather this, but it does bring up a good lesson for those developing applications be they web apps or mobile apps.

You must put yourselves in the shoes of the user and respect them.

At my previous job we investigated the use of aggregated, largely anonymous data to compare an individual to a larger peer set. This was essentially utility consumption data (electricity and natural gas) that would be aggregated anonymously such that a peer comparing it would never see the original data points but only see three aggregate comparison groups to their own consumption. We didn’t collect names or even specific addresses but we encountered enormous pushback from various partners that insisted this data could not be shared without explicit user permission.

As a developer and prolific user of online and mobile applications this seemed overly protective and pessimistic. I was initially not able to put myself in the customer’s position. Personal data, any personal data carries with it details about someone’s life. Potentially damaging or life threatening secrets in the case of who you might have in your address book. 99.9% of the time contact lists and information like energy consumption are probably benign but the customer doesn’t know how that information is stored or the entirety of its use.

I think people are concerned for the most part about the things they can’t conceive of, not the things they can. Add to that the general and justifiable mistrust of companies and you can see why many of the comments in Arrun’s blog post are in my opinion exceedingly over the top in terms of criticism towards Path.

I believe Path are taking the right approach. 1. Admit to the mistake, quickly and honestly 2. Deal with feedback in a calm and professional manner 3. Define how you will address the problem

Developers need to be conscious of the information they’re collecting. Keep it to a minimum and ensure your motivations are to improve the experience for the user. Ensure that you’re explaining your reasons clearly and always ask for permission.

Update: Path has issued an update to the app and a statement that they will remove all uploaded contact information and have added an opt-in prompt in the new version when you add a contact.

Thank You Zerofootprint

mglenn — Mon, 04 Jul 2011 15:09:45 +0000

A little more than three years ago Zerofootprint Software Inc. was born out of the not-for-profit Zerofootprint to service the burgeoning green house gas measurement market. Radiant Core, the company I founded along with Jay Goldman became Zerofootprint Software’s initial development team and for the first time I lead a development team on the client side rather than the agency side of software development.

I have learned a great deal about software development in the past three years. The most important lessons have been less about programming and more about the management of people, be that downward, upward or sideways within an organization. The nature of the rapidly evolving green market caused us to have to continually refocus and redefine the products in order to meet changes in legislation or lack thereof and new market opportunities. No two start-ups are alike and although I had previously been in two others this lesson was again apparent at Zerofootprint where new challenges were constantly keeping me on my toes and leading to constant self-discovery.

Along with its products the people at Zerofootprint have changed as well. I want to publicly thank the entire team at Zerofootprint including past employees, current employees and contractors that I have worked with. Each of them have contributed a portion of their knowledge to my learning experience that I will take forward. From all of them I have learned that the start-up is the employee. These are not large bureaucratic organizations that won’t notice a few people that drag it off course. The start-up, due to its size and position must engage all of its employees or risk its demise. Each employee needs to understand they directly affect the outcome of the organization and must continually participate in direction and performance. The current group at Zerofootprint is fully equipped to handle this challenge and I have tremendous confidence in their ability to execute.

I recently had the opportunity to work with a former client from Radiant Core in the travel industry that I simply could not pass up and thus last week my time at Zerofootprint Software came to an end, ready to meet new challenges starting next week. I will take forward all that I have learned in the past three years and move forward fondly remembering the time I had at Zerofootprint.

Lastly, the time spent at an environmentally focused company have profoundly changed the way I look at the world and the choices I make. Although I still continue to strive to be green I will always consider the ramifications of my consumption in a far more critical way. That above all is perhaps the greatest impact Zerofootprint has made on my life.

The Warehouse – the difference between storage and memory

mglenn — Fri, 13 May 2011 15:49:54 +0000

Every now and then I provide computer advice to friends and family. Eventually the subject of their computer’s performance comes up whereby I state that the most cost effective improvement to a computer’s speed is more memory. This inevitably leads to a disambiguation between memory and storage space. So for the record, here is the difference;

Memory is the working area of your computer and the hard drive is the storage area. The best analogy I can provide is a warehouse.

In a warehouse you have floor space and shelf space. When you need to access a package you take it off the shelf, put it down on the floor, open the box and work with the item. When complete you put the item back on the shelf. A computer’s hard drive and memory are analogous. The hard drive is the shelving and the memory is the floor space. There is a noticeable amount time between telling a program to run and that program being available to work with. Like shelf space, a hard drive is optimized for storage and not working with files. The process to retrieve and return items to a shelf is much more time consuming than moving them around on the floor. Memory is designed to be very fast and as such is relatively expensive compared to the space space on a hard drive. So similar to a warehouse there is much more shelf space compared to floor space.

The reason I say that adding more memory to a computer will make it faster is similar to the warehouse floorspace. As you take items off the shelf the floor becomes crowded. Eventually you can’t take anything else off the shelf without putting something back because the floor is full. A computer has this problem as well. Eventually you can’t run anymore programs because the memory becomes full. Computers, much like in a warehouse get around this problem by putting programs back onto the shelf in a special area called swap space. As I mentioned, the shelf space is much slower so as you switch between applications the computer starts to react much slower as it has to put an item on the shelf and take the requested item off.

By adding more memory or floor space to a computer you have more room to work and the computer will spend less time swapping (1) items back to the shelf or hard drive.

A as corollary, if you run out of space to store your application or files such as a glut of digital photos or home movies you need more shelf space and have to get a bigger hard drive. Typically though people run out of memory before they run out of storage space. This is largely due to the fact that each successive version of an application tends to get bigger requiring more memory or floor space when upgrading and users tend to run more programs simultaneously the longer they use their computer forgetting to shut down unused programs or getting more comfortable with multi-tasking.

(1) Computer scientists and geeks will no doubt want to correct the difference between traditional swapping and paging but that clearly doesn’t matter for the sake of this article.

iPad as a Computer Replacement

mglenn — Mon, 14 Feb 2011 01:33:39 +0000

Apple has cracked the problem of a computer for everyone else. iPad.

I’ve now demoed and recommended the iPad to several people as a replacement computer to their desktop or laptop. It has been a fantastic success for them as their main use cases are email and the web. These people fall into two broad categories. CEOs and Moms. Both are essentially light computer users that are often confounded by traditional computer interfaces.

One curious side effect of the iPad being good enough is that they never plug it into their personal computer. Their desktop or laptop is collecting dust in the corner never to be used again as there is no need. It’s heavy, complex to use and takes minutes to boot. Why would you want to use it?

The problem is that the iPad relies on a traditional computer. It’s actually required to use iTunes in order to activate. But the real problem is that unless you plug the iPad into a personal computer from time to time the operating system is never upgraded and it’s never backed up. The latter is bad for users but the former is bad for Apple. Users never get to experience the latest features and are subject to existing bugs. Apple isn’t able to migrate their customers to mitigate support costs and open up new functionality for updated or related products such as Apple TV.

The iPad needs to break away from personal computers at some point. The latest rumours suggest the iPhone 5 is being released along with cloud support in the form of a free MobileMe account designed to help store and sync your content. Apple has positioned the Mac as the centre of your digital life over the past several years. I don’t doubt that it will continue to support that role for years but requiring a Mac for AppleTV, iPhone and iPad limits the usefulness of these peripherals.

Sooner or later a friend or family member is going to get burned for not backing up their iPad often enough. Bad news for them and for Apple.

Configuring the ZTE MF668 HSPA Rocket Mobile Internet Stick on Snow Leopard

mglenn — Mon, 22 Nov 2010 16:39:18 +0000

I’m posting this for the other poor souls who’ve purchase a Rogers ZTE MF668 HSPA Rocket Mobile Internet Stick and can’t get it to connect using Snow Leopard.

1. Attach the stick to the computer. It should appear as a mounted volume. Run the Connection Manager install program to install the drivers. If you can’t see this they may already be installed but you can download and install from Rogers the ZTE MF668 MAC OS 10.4 Software.

2. After the install, go into System Preferences > Network. Unplug and plug back in the stick to ensure the device is identified properly. Two devices should appear, ZTEUSBModem and ZTEUSBATPort. Follow the next to steps for each. (Note: the Rocket Stick should have a red light that turns blue when successfully on the network.)

3. Select the device and enter wapuser1 for the Account Name and wap for the Password

4. Click the Advanced… button and in the Modem tab that appears select Generic for the Vendor and GPRS (GSM/3G) for the Model. Enter internet.com for the APN and leave CID at 1. Click OK to finalize the Modem settings.

5. Click the Apply button to apply these settings and repeat steps 3 and 4 for the second device.

6. Select the ZTEUSBModem and click the Connect button to test. If all goes well you should be connected within 15 seconds.

7. Disconnect and exit System Preferences and use the Connection Manager to test the connection again. You can connect using either but the connection manager is slightly easier to open and connect with especially if the end user isn’t that technical.

Weak Passwords

mglenn — Thu, 01 Apr 2010 13:26:29 +0000

You can read this rather detailed Lifehacker article on Weak Passwords by John Pozadzides or you can simply follow these rules.

Change all your passwords to be a minimum of eight characters long
The password must be a mix of lower case letters, upper case letters, numbers and special characters (e.g. !#@$%^&*)
Do not use similar passwords for all your accounts. If one is compromised it’s more likely that all of them will be

Combinatorics can be surprising. Going from seven characters to eight characters using rule 2 increases the possible time to crack your password from two years to two centuries.

Smitten Kitchen

mglenn — Sun, 28 Feb 2010 02:05:24 +0000

My new favourite website is a feast for the stomach and the eyes, Smitten Kitchen by Deb Perelman with assistance from her husband Alex. I have it on my RSS feed list but you have to visit the site to appreciate the labour of love that goes into this site. I’m going to try to make at least one of these recipes a week. I’m not sure if Deb is going for a cookbook after this but the photos that accompany these recipes are incredibly beautiful. Willam Sonoma needs to get in there before the ad rates go up. Follow on Twitter @smittenkitchen and Facebook. Great work Deb!

Medal Count by Athletes and Population

mglenn — Sun, 14 Feb 2010 18:10:40 +0000

Now that we’ve got some medals on the board I was interested in seeing what the points total would look like if we factored in the size of the team or the population pool that the athletes had come from to see how that changes the rankings.

See 2010 Vancouver Olympics Medal Count

Faster than Ninjas

mglenn — Thu, 28 Jan 2010 21:51:46 +0000

Mark Pilgrim pointed out that even Mozilla is having to put Flash integration on hold for their Maemo version. I am reminded of a post by John Chen in the Flash Poor Performance on Max OS X tracking bug indicating that OSX performance wasn’t of primary concern to Adobe as

our highest priority will be optimizing our player to be faster than ninjas for mobile phones

The post has since been removed but I pulled it from an email update. It appears that John had revised the post and it was eventually deleted from the forums. Nevertheless the performance ninjas haven’t shown up yet.

Giving Back

mglenn — Thu, 19 Nov 2009 03:56:37 +0000

I recently started using the mobile location application / game Foursquare. It allows you to share your location with friends and earn points and badges for how often you share. Foursquare also allows you to integrate with your Twitter account to announce when you’ve “checked in” at a location, earned a badge or earned the status of “mayor” at a particular location. I had thought this was all great fun until Mike Shaver popped up on my Twitter feed.

I wouldn’t say that I have a lot of followers on Twitter. 200 people seems like a lot but I’m sure a great deal is SPAM related so when someone like Shaver un-follows it makes me pause to assess the situation.

Twitter can be great fun to let your followers know what you’re up to, where you are, what your eat or what’s bugging you. There comes a time, however when you have to give back to the community. This applies not only to Twitter but to all internet content. If you’re not creating and sharing, you’re not adding to the community.

Also for what it’s worth, I occasionally update Foursquare but have yet to figure out the long term value proposition.