Paul Wallbank – Brilliant Communications

Category: Uncategorized

  • Join Facebook, get expelled

    Join Facebook, get expelled

    Facebook is problematic for schools. On one hand it’s a great tools for kids to connect with their peers and relatives while it also can amplify problems for children who don’t have the emotional maturity to deal with online issues.

    A common aspect of Facebook and many of the other social media services is that the minimum age for sign ups is thirteen years old and the consensus among online safety experts is children younger than that shouldn’t be encouraged to break the rules.

    Given the issues involved with younger children using Facebook it’s not surprising that teachers and school principals try to discourage younger children from signing up.

    One Queensland school principal has now ordered that any of her students breaching Facebook’s terms by signing up when under 13 will be expelled.

    That’s pretty draconian although one can sympathise with the teachers, particularly given many parents allow children to sign up despite knowing they are breaking Facebook’s terms.

    How the parents have reacted is interesting too, with online safety expert Susan McLean saying “”You could not print the response to the principal that some of the mothers wrote on Facebook”. None of this is surprising as some see their rights, and those of their children, as being paramount.

    Facebook and other social media services are tough for parents as younger kids see their old siblings online and want to be there too. Given many teenagers build their social lives around the service, you can understand the pressure children put on mum and dad to sign them up.

    As kids are going to eventually sign up to Facebook, and are probably already on services like Habbo Hotel or Club Penguin, they are going to have to deal with the issues all of us encounter online. So at least if parents are supervising usage, harm can be limited.

    One area that seems to be misunderstood is why Facebook has a “no under 13s” policy. It isn’t, as child psychologist Dr Michael Carr-Gregg believes, because Facebook care about emotionally immature children, it is due to the US COPPA law.

    COPPA – the Children’s Online Privacy Protection Act – was passed in the late 1990s to prevent inappropriate data being collected on minors. For US based social media services it’s easier to exclude children rather than set up systems that comply with the law.

    There’s many good reasons why children should be allowed to use online services, but respecting the terms of conditions of these sites is important too.

    While expelling children from school may be taking things too far, it’s not good to be encouraging twelve year old kids to lie about their ages – they’ll be doing that soon enough in their late teens.

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  • Taking care of our own

    Taking care of our own

    “The council ought to do something” growled a friend who’d been stuck in a peak hour traffic jam.

    That innocuous comment illustrates the fundamental challenge facing the developed world’s politicians – that we expect our governments to fix every problem we encounter.

    In the case of the local traffic jam, the cars creating gridlock are parents driving their children to two nearby large private schools.

    Despite the problem being caused by the choices of individuals – those decisions to send their kids to those schools and to drive them there – our modern mindset is “the government aught to do something” rather than suggesting people should be making other choices.

    Socialising the costs of our private decisions is one of the core beliefs of the 1980s mindset.

    Eventually though the money had to run out as we started to expect governments to solve every problem.

    We’re seeing the effects of this in the United States where local governments are now having pull up black top roads, close schools and renege on retirement funds as those costs become too great.

    As a society we have to accept there are limits to what governments can do for us.

    Increasingly as the world economy deleverages, tax revenues fall and the truth that a benign government can’t fulfill our every need starts to dawn on the populace, we’ll realise that expecting politicians and public servants to save us is a vain hope as they simply don’t have the resources.

    Bruce Springsteen puts this well in his song “We Take Care Of Our Own.”

    The truth today is the cargo cult mentality of waiting for governments or cashed up foreigners to come and save us is over.

    We’re going to have to rely more on our own businesses, families and communities to support us in times of need.

    The existing institutions of the corporate welfare state are beginning to collapse under the weight of their own contradictions.

    Joe Hockey knows this, but as a paid-up agent of the establishment he doesn’t dare nominate the massive cuts to middle class welfare and big business subsidies that are necessary to reform those institutions.

    Waiting for the council to fix the local roundabout is nice but it doesn’t address the bigger problems.

    It’s up to us to build the new institutions around our local communities and families. This is not a bad thing.

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  • Building aroung the blockages

    Building aroung the blockages

    “We have to wait for the baby boomers to get out of the way,” said the Gen Y girl after unsuccessfully trying to change a business culture.

    The problem is the boomers aren’t going to get out the way; they are fit, healthy and able to work for at least another decade.

    For most boomers, the promised golden age of retirement simply isn’t affordable as property prices stagnate and investment underperform.

    The smart ones also know governments can’t deliver the promises of ever increasing aged care services and middle class welfare.

    Waiting the boomers to get out of the way also assumes their younger replacements will be any better; the sad reality is many have the same views and 1960s or 80s ideologies of their mentors. Old heads on young shoulders.

    For those waiting for older generations to get out of the way so they can start changing institutions or business, it might be time to start building ones to replace stale and increasingly irrelevant incumbents.

    There’s been few times in history when circumstances have favored challenging incumbents as technology, economic conditions and social change give us the tools and opportunities to build new businesses and political parties.

    It’s hard work, but it’s a lot less frustrating than waiting for the boomers to die off.

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  • Media’s double edged sword

    Media’s double edged sword

    The sad events surrounding Invisible Children founder Jason Russell being detained by police for irrational behaviour is an example of just how powerful the media can be.

    While using new media tools can get a video like Stop Kony in front of 70 million people is a great achievement, it also brings attention and responsibility on the creators.

    That responsibility also brings stress and none of us are really prepared for what attention on a global scale can bring.

    Regardless of one’s views of the Kony 2012 campaign, what’s happened to Jason Russell is a terrible thing.

    One hopes Jason will overcome his demons and family come together in what must be a terrible time.

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  • Understanding the virus epidemic

    Understanding the virus epidemic

    Researching last weekend’s post about the Mac Flashback Trojan, I stumbled across a bunch of articles referring to John Gruber’s 2011 “Wolf” post looking at nearly a decade of Mac malware security false alarms.

    One of the rebuttals titled Hey Gruber, You Might Want to Reconsider Crying Wolf is typical, stating;

    Fact is that the day will come when Macs, iPhones, iPads become equal opportunity targets for malware and all those other nasties out there and no amount of quote stuff into a quasi post by John Gruber will change that.

    Nine months after that article was written the Mac malware tsunami is still being breathlessly awaited for by the Big Target school of security experts. Just as it has been for a decade.

    Origins of an epidemic

    The theory that the Mac, along with smartphones, tablets computers and Linux systems, were spared the virus epidemic that plagued Windows users last decade is a based on a misunderstanding of the problem.

    What caused the Microsoft malware epidemic was laughable security in Windows 98, ME and the early versions of XP.

    Users running Internet Explorer with no firewall in Administrator mode – which is how these versions came out of the box – could be infected in minutes. I once saw a Windows XP system infected within six seconds of going on the net, although that was partly because of the ISPs lousy security practices.

    Despite the fantasies of some security “experts”, other software companies like Apple didn’t follow Microsoft’s lax security attitude of the late 1990s.

    Microsoft itself has moved on. After Bill Gates’ Trustworthy Computing memo, the company tightened its security practices and the later versions of XP along with subsequent versions of Windows like Vista were far better protected.

    Big target fallacies

    This is why we won’t see similar malware epidemics on Windows 7, Macs, Linux, smartphone and tablet computer systems regardless of how big the targets become.
    What “Big Target” advocates also overlook is the nature of crime and vandalism; most of it is opportunistic. For every bank that gets robbed by a gang of skilled, patient safecrackers there a millions of old ladies who get mugged for the change in purses.
    Yet according to the “Big Target” folk, there should be a queue of cunning bank robbers standing outside every branch because, as Jesse James said, “that’s where the money is.”
    What Internet users should understand is the nature of the virus threat has changed, today malware writers are looking at using well crafted social engineering scams that trick us into allowing them access into our systems and bank accounts.
    One of the big concerns are rogue apps that plug into our social media services, smartphones or tablet computers – particularly those which ask permission to access our data or share logins.
    A great example of this is a reported piece of malware for Android phones that uses fake Facebook requests to trick users into installing it on their phone which will then dial premium SMS numbers.

    We are the weakest link

    No system is truly secure and usually we, the users, are the weakest point. Serious discussions about computer security look at today and tomorrow’s threats and don’t try to spin past experiences.

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