Last year I wrote about the insufficient affordances in the design of the emergency breaks in Montreal’s Metro trains. While the trains have been in operation for more than 40 years, it seems providing intuitive user interfaces is still not considered important to the STM (Montreal Transit Corporation) even today. Consider this panel found outside the elevators which were newly installed at some stations:
Elevator button panel (via fagstein.com)
Intuitively, which button would you press to call the elevator?
Today I came across a rather thought-provoking blog post by Ryan Bitanga on Planet KDE called Security and the Cloud. He argues that moving personal and corporate data into the Cloud – a form of on-demand on-line computing infrastructure where “Users need not have knowledge of, expertise in, or control over the technology infrastructure” as Wikipedia states – is inherently unsafe. He continues,
Without the need to physically access a target device, your data is no longer secure once your credentials are compromised. [...] Granted, this is an issue shared with most, if not all, networks connected to the internet. However, cloud computing amplifies this problem by having all your data readily accessible from the internet.
I could not agree more.
However, what is needed are strategies to mitigate those risks. To prevent unauthorized access to data in the cloud, it should become common practice to use two-factor authentication such as the combination of a password known by the user and a hardware-generated token (e.g. SecurID). Only if an attacker has access to the password as well as the physical token generator, access can be (rightfully) obtained.
Although the above procedure would reduce the risk of unauthorized access through password theft, another plausible attack scenario that I see is the storage service being either compromised or being the intruder itself. One particular example that comes to my mind is the Google Mail service which analyzes its users’ emails in order to provide contextual advertising. While such analysis might not worry personal email users too much, the fact that a foreign enterprise even has the theoretical ability to poke around in other corporate data hosted on its servers should ring all alarm bells of any company deriving its business value from its data. Therefore, an additional layer of encryption hiding the content from the storage service should be the default procedure for companies looking to moving their data into the Cloud.
Overall, it however appears to me that awareness for such security and trust issues does not adequately exist yet and current discussions about Cloud computing are mainly one-sided and benefits driven. I wonder what kind of major data theft incident will be necessary before the discussion approaches a more balanced level.
Update: The New York times ran an article yesterday, sharing many of these views. Read it here.
The Libre Graphics Meeting 2009 about Free and Open Source graphics applications took place in Montreal at the beginning of May. I was happy to be invited to give a 10 minute lightning talk about FacetZoom.
A video of my presentation is now available online and you can also find a good summary of the entire meeting at Linux.com.
Overall it seems that quite a few Vimeo users were surprised to see their service had one of the worst terms:
“I’m distressed to find where the two sites I use the most (YouTube and Vimeo) are listed.” — Tensegrities
“Interestingly, current darling of the video hosting world Vimeo doesn’t come out too well [...]” — Machinima for Dummies
“[...] the best sites are the most restrictive.” — CoPress
“Boo Vimeo! I always got the feeling they were pretty filmmaker friendly [...]” — OTTfilms forum
“Netribution’s (until now) prefered site Vimeo comes off the worst” — Netribution
Jim Mortleman commented this with advice to video hosting services that “[in order to be successful] you need to be clear that you’re not going to hijack [a user's] work” – a statement in line with Lawrence Lessig’s remarks at approx. minute 40 of his OFC conference keynote. While undoubtedly true, I believe there is a broader concept that should be targeted first, without which the legal terms are mostly irrelevant: the User Experience.
Today, a video hosting service offering a clean website with a simple and easy to use video player is simply much more likely to get new users signed up and uploading content than a service where the website is cluttered and the video player is difficult to use. User experience is the necessary enabler that must be present in order to allow a service to become successful. The large mass of users is simply not going to even look at the Terms of Use if their experience is sufficiently satisfying, which I would say is just what happened here in the case for Vimeo.
Although the importance of the legal terms might rise in the future, e.g. through growing user awareness or some services trying to monetize on their users’ content as Jim suspects, this just underscores the importance of providing a good user experience in my view. Assuming that the legal terms do matter to users, the ability of a service to win new users – as well as to not negatively surprise existing users – will then not only depend on the user experience in regard to a service’s video features but also on whether a service is able to convey the meaning of its legal terms. Providing difficult to understand legal terms will leave users with no better impression than a video player that is difficult to use, even if the legal terms would actually be very favorable for users.
It is thus critical to first ensure a positive user experience in regard to the video features and the comprehensibility of legal terms before starting to look at the actual legal meaning of a service’s Terms of Use. Addressing the legal meaning first has not led services to major success until now and I do not believe it will in the future, whereas it appears clear that by focusing on the user experience first, at least Vimeo seems to have gained a large following, irrespective of its very unfavorable legal terms.
For the Air Canada article I was researching a video hosting service that would match my requirements of:
Which rights of my work I would have to give away,
what usage rights I could assign to my viewers,
what level of privacy I could expect in terms of disclosure of my data,
and where a service had its legal residence in case of a dispute.
I’ve decided to collect and extend my findings in this post in the hope that it can help others in choosing their preferred video hosting service.
A summary is provided at the end of this post, based on my understanding of the legal terms as a non-lawyer. All excerpts were made on April 25, 2009 unless otherwise stated. Emphasis and comments mine.
A common cliche associated with Linux is that it is difficult for non-involved users to use and especially to modify in terms of installing new or upgrading already installed software. Having used Linux for several years, I would agree that this was an issue in the past, where some Linux distributions (i.e. bundles of the Linux operating system with additional software) would occasionally stumble and leave the system in an inconsistent state after an upgrade. However, with the Ubuntu Linux distribution, such troubles finally seem to be a thing of the past.
Upgrade notification for Ubuntu 9.04 (Source: Ubuntu website)
Yesterday, I wanted to upgrade a Laptop with an Ubuntu 8.10 installation to the newly released version 9.04. Instead of having to download and burn an installation CD, all I had to do was click on an “Upgrade” button in the Update Manager. I discovered this as the Update manager is generally used for installing security updates and this time, a short text in the window notified me that the new version 9.04 was available. So after clicking Upgrade, the release notes of 9.04 were displayed and after confirming these, a final reminder was shown, not to interrupt the system whie the upgrade was in progress. And that was it.
Three clicks was all that was necessary to upgrade the entire distribution to the next major release. This is how easy it is supposed to be. Now when was the last time you went from Windows XP to Vista with that simple of a process?
Although Ubuntu seems to have raised the bar very high, there is still room for improvement. The primary complaint I would have is that not all of the screens I mentioned were fully localized. The system I upgraded was using German as the default language whereas the release notes were shown in English. Furthermore, one of the upgrade confirmation buttons was also labeled in English. This could be a major issue for some people who don’t speak English very well or not at all.
Other than that however, I was very positively surprised.
Another flight with Air Canada gave me the opportunity to inspect their in-flight entertainment system (IFE) once again. Here is a video I took of the system in action:
What has changed since last summer? I’ve listed my observations with recommendations on how it could be improved:
The entire system still feels sluggish for two reasons: The first is because of slow loading of screens, the second is because of slow perceived response. In regard to the loading of screens, the main screen takes four seconds to load whereas the “TV” screen even requires seven seconds. As for the response time, I can measure in the video that the cursor shows an hour glass one second after a command has been issued and the screen starts updating only one second later, in other words two seconds after touching.
→ I would recommend reducing the response time of commands in order to give users a better feeling of direct interaction.
Features that are unavailable are still shown in the menus, for example, “CBC News” were selectable but would lead to a “content not available on this flight” screen.
→ If a feature is not available, it should not be selectable or completely removed.
The language selection is still shown, even if only one language is available for a feature.
→ Given the time it takes to load a screen, this is another situation where the user has to deal with the system instead of being able to do what she wants to, namely watch content. The language selection should not be shown in this case.
After selecting a show or movie to watch, advertisements are shown for several minutes. These advertisements turn off user input completely so it is impossible to change volume or abort to watch something else.
→ The decision to show ads is obviously a business decision and I can understand that users are not supposed to skip ads. However, it doesn’t justify not letting them do anything while ads are shown.
A lot of content is still adjusted to fit the now outdated 4:3 screen ratio, therefore black bars appear left and right of the picture. Even more, for some other content such as movie trailers, the original widescreen ratio image including the top/bottom black bars is encoded into the adjusted 4:3 picture, thus leading to black bars on all four sides of the screen. This is for example observable for the advertising clip captured in my video above.
→ As the screens are in my opinion just large enough to adequately watch video, it is counterproductive to artificially shrink the image. I can imagine that this is the result of a content purchasing department that has absolutely no understanding of what content formatting is best for users to watch on their systems.
Lastly, the passenger announcements cause the volume to be raised to a fixed level at almost maximum volume. While I was watching a movie on low volume using my own in-ear headphones which nicely block out the airplane noise, an unexpected passenger announcement almost made my eardrums burst.
→ While I can somewhat understand that announcements are initially set to a high volume, I have no understanding for a system that doesn’t allow adjusting the volume while an announcement is made. In other words, I had to be prepared to unplug my headphones in a split-second the entire time while watching a movie. Otherwise an announcement would have blasted my ears out again. This is not user-friendly at all and the system should allow users to change volume even for announcements.
Overall, if the in-flight entertainment system is any indication, I am not surprised Air Canada is about to file for bankruptcy again. Or are the IFE systems of other airlines the same? I’d like to hear about it in the comments.
After another work-week with a dizzying amount of overtime, its a good opportunity to think back to a weekend trip not so long ago. There, I discovered this nice little table lamp which provided some illumination to the room I was staying in.
How to turn on or off?
The obvious main question I had about the lamp was how to actually turn it on or off. In North America such lamps typically possess some sort of knob or small bolt near the socket of the light bulb which has to be either rotated or pushed in order to turn a lamp on or off. Most of the time this means you will have to fumble around for a while because your view is blocked by the lamp’s shade, therefore always making you fear that you might touch the light bulb and burn yourself or that the entire lamp might fall off the table.
This lamp however had no apparent knob and while I was continuing my search for it, the lamp suddenly turned on. It turned out that the only thing I had to do in order to turn on the lamp was to simply touch the lamp’s base anywhere on its shiny green surface. Touch the base a second time and it would turn off again. This design might not provide for the best discoverability or affordance but pretty much anyone – people with motor impairments included – should be able to perform the task. So, overall, I find it a great example of good usability in a commodity object.
Now if only more lamps in North America would be made this way, I could finally stop fearing to tip over lamps when searching for the switch in the middle of the night…
At work it’s been very busy the last weeks, with a particular customer changing requirements more often than the word has letters, therefore it’s unfortunately been a bit quiet in here…
Nevertheless, I wanted to quickly point out that in both, the European Union and Canada, there are currently hearings about “net neutrality“. This term refers to the notion, that Internet Service Providers (ISPs) are generally expected not to interfere with or discriminate against any of the applications their customers use on the Internet. The discussion arose, when some ISPs started to throttle Peer-to-peer filesharing traffic to relieve their network load, as such applications create up to 70% of overall Internet traffic in some parts of the world.
Relative amount of peer-to-peer filesharing traffic compared to overall Internet traffic by geographic region. Source: torrentfreak.com
The general consensus of Internet users seems to be that discriminating certain content is a bad practice as it prevents users from utilizing whatever applications they want to use, at a level of quality they expect from their Internet connection. Therefore, the current discussion is, whether ISPs should be forced to abstain from discriminating against certain traffic by the force of law, or if the market forces will sufficiently punish ISPs and therefore discourage the practice.
In the current edition of ACM’s Communications magazine, there is a lengthy and well-written point-counterpoint article about the topic. In terms of arguments, I must say the force-of-law arguments appear to hold up much better than the market-based approach. On the German blog netzpolitik.org, there is also a video interview with Rossoglau Kostas of the European Consumers’ Organization about the topic:
I thus invite readers to voice their opinions about the topics so they are considered in the hearings. The platform for Canada is SaveOurNet.ca which allows for directly sending an e-mail to the Canadian Radio-television and Telecommunications Commission (CRTC) commissioner charged with the hearings. Law professor Michael Geist points out that the deadline for submissions has been extended to February 23. For the European union, La Quadrature du Net is a very active citizen group participating in the discussions, although their website is less clear as to how individuals can support them.
If you’ve followed recent discussions about the growing necessity of copyright reforms, you’ve most likely heard of Lawrence Lessig, the founding board member of Creative Commons. In a nutshell, Creative Commons – or just CC – is a set of permissive licences which any creator of creative content can assign to her own work to explicitly permit other people to build upon and reuse or remix the works according to the simple rules outlined in the license. While Creative Commons licenses have been in existence for more than six years, they are only now starting to be adopted by major content producers such as the Arabic TV network Al Jazeera or the band Nine Inch Nails, who released their on-line best-selling album Ghosts I-IV under a CC licence at the day of release for free downloading and non-commercial remixing.
When Lawrence Lessig was invited as a guest of the popular satire TV show The Colbert Report to present his newest book, this promised to provide some entertainment. See for yourself:
(Unfortunately, the TV show does not use a CC license yet, so the video might be removed at some point.)
The above interview is obviously a clear invitation for remix artists to get creative and I think that is exactly what Eclectic Method have been:
Make sure to visit their website and watch their video mix-tape Lock Up Your Videos for some great combinations of a wide style of music genres. I think that artists such as these really show what kind of creative new works are possible by remixing existing content with today’s digital tools. In other words, it is now primarily the legal system which holds back these artists and no longer the technical limitations of computer systems as was the case only a few years ago.
