According to one estimate pushed by the FBI in 2006, computer crime costs US businesses $67 billion a year. And identity fraud in the US allegedly hit $52.6Bn in 2004.

Even allowing for self-serving reporting (the FBI would obviously find it useful to inflate the threat of crime, if only to justify their budget requests), that’s a lot of money being pumped down a rat-hole. Extrapolate it worldwide and the figures are horrendous — probably nearer to $300Bn a year. To put it in perspective, it’s like the combined revenue (not profits; gross turnover) of Intel, Microsoft, Apple, and IBM — and probably a few left-overs like HP and Dell — being lost due to deliberate criminal activity.

Where does this parasitic drag come from? Where did we go wrong?

I’m compiling a little list, of architectural sins of the founders (between 1945 and 1990, more or less) that have bequeathed us the current mess. They’re fundamental design errors in our computing architectures; their emergent side-effects have permitted the current wave of computer crime to happen . . .

I make it a rule never to believe the order of magnitude claimed by a self-interested party about how much money is “lost” because of their current hobby-horse mopery and dopery. Even if the amount claimed by the FBI is off by an order of magnitude, that’s still serious money.

This is an example of the difference between a traditional MMO quest and a dynamic event in GW2, by Eric Flannum:

You see, we’ve been running some brand new players through Guild Wars 2 in some very targeted focus tests lately to see how they’ll react to the world we’ve created. Some of these players have been strongly conditioned by years of MMO playing to look specifically for quest bangs over the heads of NPCs and ignore everything else. We have found that at first, they tend to ignore the events going on in the world. They might run right past a fisherman imploring passersby to kill a marauding Drake Broodmother and they might even run by a wheat field being burned to ground by bandits.

Eventually it will start dawning on them that something different is going on in this game. One of our testers, upon seeing a huddle of sick villagers standing around a poisoned well, made the comment, “I feel like someone is trying to tell me something.” She ran down into the valley and noticed that the irrigation towers that water the fields were pumping out a green noxious liquid and that the fields were being overrun with grubs living off of the poisoned water. When she reached a giant water reservoir brimming over with noxious poison, she said, “Ah, this is where my peeps are being poisoned.” She immediately looked around the area for some solution to the crisis, found a waterworks worker who knew how to remedy the solution, and helped him do it. Once the reservoir had been cleansed, the villagers got better, the irrigators stopped spewing poison, and the grubs started to die. She received a nice reward of XP, gold, and karma for helping out.

All of this occurred without her accepting a single quest, and our tester got a nice heroic story about how her character helped save an entire village. Of course, she arrived somewhere in the middle of the event chain — she didn’t even find out what caused the poisoning in the first place. This particular tester was satisfied that she had helped the poisoned villagers, and didn’t go looking deeper for what had caused the poison in the first place. However, if she had wanted to look deeper, she could talk to some of the inhabitants of the area and learn that they’ve been having problems with bandits who inhabit a nearby cave system. She might even have learned that these bandits poisoned the water reservoir. Now it would be up to her to decide whether or not she wanted to go into the bandit caves and try to stop them further or even stick around and defend the reservoir in case the bandits tried anything else.

An event in the area/world will cause new events to become available depending on the actions of the players.

For those of you who have played various MMOs you’ll know that the general flow of a quest is this:

Go to quest giver → collect quest → kill x amount of y critter, who is minding it’s own business in a field a good journey away from the quest giver → return to quest giver and collect reward, usually ignoring the small novel worth of text.

And after umpteen levels of this you can understand why people cringe at the thought of having to level a new character up to max. At least in WAR you could almost completely ignore PvE and level up by bashing the opposing realm’s skulls in.

Now with GW2 we’ll hopefully start to see a step away from the standard quest model and towards one that actually feels like you’ve had an impact on the world. Example:

I could be exploring an find a floating crystal. Me being me I decide to poke it with a stick. This causes the crystal to release the monsters it was holding, which begin to attack the nearby village. Depending on how successful this is the village will either survive or be destroyed (until it is rebuilt) and from that a new line of quests will appear.

As I’ve mentioned before, I’m quite interested in the innovations the folks on the development and content teams are working on, and I really do hope they can pull it off: it’ll be much more compelling than the current standard.

When building an MMO, we had to examine every core piece of accepted content from traditional games in the genre and ask, “How can this be improved?” By looking at the traditional quest system used in basically every MMO ever made, we’ve come to the conclusion that quests have a lot of areas for improvement. To address these flaws, we’ve developed our dynamic event system.

[. . .]

In Guild Wars 2, our event system won’t make you read a huge quest description to find out what’s going on. You’ll experience it by seeing and hearing things in the world. If a dragon is attacking, you won’t read three paragraphs telling you about it, you’ll see buildings exploding in giant balls of fire, and hear characters in the game world screaming about a dragon attack. You’ll hear guards from nearby cities trying to recruit players to go help fight the dragon, and see huge clouds of smoke in the distance, rising from the village under siege.

[. . .]

In traditional MMOs, when a quest is completed it has no real effect on the game world. You receive your reward and then move on, looking for the next quest to do. The world appears no better or worse for your actions. In GW2, the outcome of every event will directly affect the game world around you. If an enemy dredge army is marching out of their main base, players will be asked to mobilize with their allies and help destroy the army. If the dredge army is defeated, other events will cascade out from there. Players will be able battle their way inside the dredge base, face off against their commander, rescue captured friendly troops being held in the dredge prisons, and even hold the captured base while fighting waves of dredge, who arrive from deep underground to try and take back their home.

This sounds great, and helps to explain why Guild Wars 2 has been so long in development: you can’t use off-the-shelf programming for something that hasn’t been done before.

I’m quite looking forward to the new game (the original Guild Wars has been my main online addiction for years), although I am concerned that the development team may be attempting to change too many things away from the MMORPG default models. The whole “the world changes based on player activity” thing could get quite messy — although it’ll certainly take away a lot of the “been there, done that, got the reward” feeling you can get in games of this type.

Gen. Stanley A. McChrystal, the leader of American and NATO forces in Afghanistan, was shown a PowerPoint slide in Kabul last summer that was meant to portray the complexity of American military strategy, but looked more like a bowl of spaghetti.

“When we understand that slide, we’ll have won the war,” General McChrystal dryly remarked, one of his advisers recalled, as the room erupted in laughter.

[. . .]

“PowerPoint makes us stupid,” Gen. James N. Mattis of the Marine Corps, the Joint Forces commander, said this month at a military conference in North Carolina. (He spoke without PowerPoint.) Brig. Gen. H. R. McMaster, who banned PowerPoint presentations when he led the successful effort to secure the northern Iraqi city of Tal Afar in 2005, followed up at the same conference by likening PowerPoint to an internal threat.

“It’s dangerous because it can create the illusion of understanding and the illusion of control,” General McMaster said in a telephone interview afterward. “Some problems in the world are not bullet-izable.

[. . .]

Senior officers say the program does come in handy when the goal is not imparting information, as in briefings for reporters.

The news media sessions often last 25 minutes, with 5 minutes left at the end for questions from anyone still awake. Those types of PowerPoint presentations, Dr. Hammes said, are known as “hypnotizing chickens.”

One of the worst aspects of any PowerPoint presentation is that by the use of graphic tricks and pretty effects, serious flaws in actual content can be “handwaved over”. This is great for the presenter who doesn’t want to impart real information, but terrible for the victims audience. Bulleted lists are a useful device for summarizing key ideas that don’t necessarily have a hard sequence or hierarchy, but they can also be used to imply illogical or inconsistent groupings of concepts or facts, especially when the eye (and the mind) is being entranced by whizzy tricks.

To paraphrase Sir Humphrey Appleby, “a good Civil Servant must be able to use PowerPoint not as a window into the mind but as a curtain to draw across it.”

I’ve sounded the warning call about the evil incarnate that is PowerPoint before. Do have a look at the (yes, I recognize the irony) slideshow here.

Update, 30 April: PowerPoint badges for your BDUs.

They are going to drive me absolutely insane.

Did you know … that you can select the program with which to open a file by right-clicking on the file and selecting Open With…?

DID YOU KNOW THAT?!

That is the MOST AMAZING THING EVER, according to the oldsters. These guys could not figure out how to open a text file that has an extension other than .TXT. I showed them the Open With… twiddlebit, and now Head Oldster is busy adding the procedure to our internal style guide.

Gobsmacked with heartbroken outrage, I said “Dude. Anyone who has used Windows for any amount of time will know that. You don’t have to put it into our style guide.”

To which he responded: “I have been doing this for 20 years, and this is the first time I’ve heard of this. So it should be documented.”

I don’t know how much longer I can work here.

And to top if off, BOTH OF THEM are constantly getting calls from headhunters and former employers who want them back as contractors. How is that possible? Head Oldster can generally get through the day, but The New Guy — Judas on a Vespa with Cheese and Peppers. Watching him navigate through FrameMaker is like watching Stephen Hawking type out A Brief History of Time character-by-character with his eyeballs, minus the genius part of it.

The guy struggles to find the SAME FUNCTIONS THAT HE USES EVERY DAY in the menus. How can he possibly beswamped with job offers? IS THE ECONOMY DOING THAT WELL?

Crickey.

I have to admit, reading this rant made me feel better about my own work . . .

After dealing with McAfee’s most recent fix that sabotaged Windows XP PC clients worldwide, users of the antivirus software headed over to Twitter to vent their rage, creating a public-relations and legal nightmare that will likely continue long after the last machine is patched.

“I hate McAfee,” more than one Tweeter wrote, summing up the frustration felt when a McAfee update identified a “normal Windows process” as malware and killed it, kicking off a death spiral for the affected machines.

Another Tweet: “McAfee DAT 5958, you’ve made…no wait, what’s the opposite of “made my day”?… you’ve DESTROYED MY DAY. hate you McAfee. HAAATEEEEE.”

“VirusScan,” another person Tweeted. “The cure is worse than the disease.”

I was fortunate, as fellow blogger William P. alerted me to the issue and I got home and turned off McAfee automatic updating before my desktop machine loaded the poison update.

“It’s funny in a way”, says Bill Gates, relaxing in an armchair in his office. “When I was young, I didn’t know any old people. When we did the microprocessor revolution, there was nobody old, nobody. It’s weird how old this industry has become.” The Microsoft cofounder and I, a couple of fiftysomething codgers, are following up on an interview I had with a tousle-headed Gates more than a quarter century ago. I was trying to capture what I thought was the red-hot core of the then-burgeoning computer revolution — the scarily obsessive, absurdly brainy, and endlessly inventive people known as hackers. Back then, Gates had just pulled off a deal to supply his DOS operating system to IBM. His name was not yet a household word; even Word was not yet a household word. I would interview Gates many times over the years, but that first conversation was special. I saw his passion for computers as a matter of historic import. Gates himself saw my reverence as an intriguing novelty. But by then I was convinced that I was documenting a movement that would affect everybody.

The book I was writing, Hackers: Heroes of the Computer Revolution, came out just over 25 years ago, in the waning days of 1984. My editor had urged me to be ambitious, and so I shot high, crafting a 450-page narrative in three parts, making the case that hackers — brilliant programmers who discovered worlds of possibility within the coded confines of a computer — were the key players in a sweeping digital transformation.

I hadn’t expected to reach that conclusion. When I embarked on my project, I thought of hackers as little more than an interesting subculture. But as I researched them, I found that their playfulness, as well as their blithe disregard for what others said was impossible, led to the breakthroughs that would define the computing experience for millions of people.

I must have read Hackers during my first or second semester in college, as I tried to figure out how to get out of the series of dead-end jobs I’d had since leaving school. I found strong echoes of many of the characters Levy portrayed in the people I encountered in my first few “high tech” jobs, although I don’t think any of them have managed to become billionaires yet.

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Cory Doctorow, “Video-game shoppers surrender their immortal souls”, BoingBoing, 2010-04-16

The U.S. Army is getting very tight with the Apple Corporation, mainly because soldiers have long been enthusiastic users of Apple products (iPod and iPhone, and probably iPad as well). But Apple has tight control over what software can be used on these devices, so the military needs a close relationship with Apple just to get their custom military software on the iPods, iPhones and iPads the troops are so enthusiastic about.

This relationship enabled the army to recently run a programming contest for troops and civilian employees. The goal was to create the most effective smart phone software for the troops. Mainly, this was for the iPhones (and iPod Touch), but also for other smart phones like the Google Android. The army believes their military and civilian personnel know what applications are most needed. The troops have already decided what hardware they most need, because they have been buying iPods and iPhones with their own money.

The army sees these portable devices as key battlefield devices. Not just for communication, but for a wide range of data handling (computer) chores. The army wants to work closely with Apple to ensure the troops get the software need, as well as customized hardware. Details are largely kept secret.

[. . .]

The Touch has become the new “most favorite gadget” for the troops. It’s cheap (under $200), has the same interface as the iPhone, has several hundred thousand programs (and growing rapidly) available, and can also serve as an iPod (to listen to music or view vids). What the military sees the Touch as is the PDA (Personal Digital Assistant) that has often (in many different models) been issued over the years, but never really caught on. The Touch has caught on, and it does the job better than any earlier PDA. The Touch also has wi-fi built in, making it easier for the troops to get new software or data onto their Touch.

For use in the combat zone, troops usually put one of the many protective covers on their Touch, and, so far, the Touch has held up well under battlefield conditions. Meanwhile, some of the software written for earlier iPods, is now available for the Touch. This includes the VCommunicator Mobile software and libraries. This system translates English phrases into many foreign languages. Each language takes up four gigabytes per language, so they easily fit on the Touch. The software displays graphics, showing either the phrase in Arabic, or a video of a soldier making the appropriate hand gesture (there are a lot of those in Arabic), and this looks great on the Touch. There are collections of phrases for specific situations, like checkpoint, raid or patrol. You can use any accessory made for the iPod, like larger displays or megaphones.