Daily Archives: February 20, 2011

Confessions of a (reformed) petrolhead

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Here’s a terrible confession from a Prius owner: I was once a petrolhead. Worse: towards the end of my student days I had a 3.8-litre Mk II Jaguar (like the one in the photograph and the one owned by Inspector Morse in the TV series, but not in as nice condition as either of those). It was wonderful for a while. But then came the Yom Kippur war, and the OPEC oil-price hike and suddenly it cost £20 to drive to the end of the street and so, sadder but wiser, I sold it and bought a VW Beetle.

But back then I used to think that maybe it’d be fun to be a motoring journalist.

Reading Sam Wollaston in the Guardian has cured me retrospectively of that illusion: I just wasn’t a witty enough writer. Witness his latest piece — about the Volvo V60 D3 SE Lux Premium:

Do I know how to start it, asks the man from Volvo. Hey, come on, I’m an experienced motoring journalist – of course I know how to bloody start it. Leave me alone. So he does. And within half an hour or so, I’m on the move. You have to insert the key fob thing into the key fob dock thing, put your foot on the brake, then hit the start button. Remember when cars had ignition keys? Wasn’t that so boring? And straightforward. Anyway, thank God I’m not a getaway driver. I wouldn’t have got away.

Some of this car’s toys are more useful, such as the safety ones. So you’re driving up the M1, distracted by something (the kids or the dogs fighting in the back, say), you start to drift into the neighbouring lane… beep beep, beep beep, says the car. That’ll be the Lane Departure Warning kicking in. Or you actually want to change lanes, but you’re too old and stiff to look over your shoulder. You can’t see anything in the wing mirror, it’s probably clear… except suddenly there is a yellow light in the mirror, the Blind Spot Information System telling you another car is there. More lights appear on the windscreen if you get too close to the car in front. There’s also a City Safety System, which makes the car automatically brake if the vehicle in front slows down or stops: this car is constantly sending out radar and sonar and what have you to keep me out of trouble – it’s like driving a bat.

He’s intrigued by the “Pedestrian Detection” system that looks out for person-shaped things on the road in front, warns you, then brakes if you decide not to do anything.

I want to test it out, with my girlfriend as the person-shaped thing, but she won’t, unsportingly – says she’s worried that after all the Christmas bingeing, she won’t be recognised as person-shaped. How embarrassing would that be?

Oh — and another thing… The Jag had a ‘Start’ button in its veneered walnut dashboard. Just like Windows 95.

Picture credit: http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/User:Arnaud_25

The WikiLeaks phenomenon reviewed

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From my review of two of the current wave of books about WikiLeaks.

Experience showed, however, that often mere revelation was not enough: the world yawned and turned away. Often the leaked material was complex and unintelligible to the lay browser. It needed expert interpretation – and corroboration. So gradually it dawned on Assange and his colleagues that the best way of making an impact on the world might be to collaborate with journalistic organisations, which could provide the interpretation and the checking needed to ensure that people believed what was being leaked. This is the value that the Guardian, the New York Times, Der Spiegel and the other media partners added to the vast troves of documents that Assange brought to them.

But if it turned out that WikiLeaks needed conventional journalism, it has also become clear that conventional journalism needs what WikiLeaks created, namely a secure technology for enabling people to upload confidential material that they believe should be in the public domain. So it's important that serious media organisations now build that kind of technology themselves, just in case WikiLeaks is overcome by the fragility of its finances, its managerial problems or the legal vulnerability of its founder. In a world increasingly dominated by secretive, unaccountable corporations and in which authoritarian regimes continue to flourish, we will need robust technologies for ensuring that some secrets cannot be kept…

Confessions of an Apple Store Employee

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Now here is something you don’t see every day — an Apple employee spilling the beans. Fascinating insight into how the Apple Store works. Samples:

Evil Customers

Its amazing how badly behaved some customers are. I have seen customers have complete meltdowns and get phones exchanged that were like two years old. They scream, cry, curse. And it works. People can be horrible. Sometimes it’s like working at McDonald’s, with better pay. I’ve never been treated so badly in my life.

Dealing With Drug Dealers

We get a lot of drug dealers who try to buy iPhones with fake IDs. You can tell them instantly just by how shady they act, and they know you know, but you obviously can’t start accusing them of being drug dealers—they are customers, after all. But when they try to check out, they’ll use what are obviously fake IDs or fake credit cards, and it often turns out they’re using a dead person’s Social Security number or something. And when you call them out on that—then, they run.

Pushing MobileMe

We aren’t paid on commission, but you fear for your job if you’re not selling enough. We’re supposed to sell AppleCare product support with just about everything, and honestly, those aren’t that hard to sell, since they aren’t a bad deal. But we’re also supposed to push MobileMe, and that’s really hard to sell. Nobody ever sells it.

WikiLeaks: Big Business has wised up and it ain’t pretty

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This morning’s Observer column.

What’s instructive about the Julius Baer case is how clueless the bank and its agents were about the net. They looked like blind men poking a tiger with a stick. It was amusing at the time, but it was too good to last. It was inevitable that the corporate world would wise up and in the past few weeks we’ve begun to see some of the results of that re-education process. And it ain’t pretty.

What’s driving things now is the conjecture that the next big WikiLeaks exposé concerns Bank of America. And deep in the lush undergrowth of corporate America, security, consulting and PR companies have perceived lucrative business opportunities in helping putative WikiLeaks targets get their retaliation in first.

We got a glimpse of this twilight world when the activist group Anonymous hacked into the servers of an internet security firm…