Technology Futures

Dell is going to start installing Google software on its new computers. While this is yet another shot across the bow of Microsoft, the more interesting part of this to me is that Dell will get paid to do this. While Dell will doubtless market this as a convenience to customers, I'll bet a lot of them won't appreciate the effort. Corporate buyers of Dell equipment will likely tell the company not to bother.

Dell is doing this not because it thinks Google's spamware, er, software is essential software for customers. RAther, it's doing it because profit margins are razor thin and the company needs the payments from Google to stay out of the red.

This is just one of several stories I have seen recently about K12 students who have their own blogs and get censured by K12 school officials. Student blogs are now common, and school systems have failed to adapt to the new reality. It clearly unnerves some school administrators that students now have a public forum completely independent of the school system. In the old days, students with a bent for writing worked on the school paper, which was monitored by a faculty member.

But today, students have blogs on MySpace, Xanga, and hundreds of other blog services. To be fair, parents have not always kept up with the times either; students are often posting too much personal information on their blogs, making them vulnerable to stalkers, sex offenders, or just other kids with a grudge. But the problem the schools have is actually just a free speech issue. Kids are writing about their dissatisfaction with a teacher or administrator, and schools are overreacting by labeling such writing as "threats" and punishing the student by suspension or expulsion.

Often the writing seems relatively innocuous, as it does in the case I linked to above--a Chicago area student who felt harrassed about having a blog. The school system is now trying to expel him. However puerile the writing may be, school officials have little control over what students do outside of school hours. The tactic most schools seem to be using is to call the writing a "threat" to school safety, but in the absence of something specific, it is not a threat just to express one's dissatisfaction with school officials. These overreactions often end up as free speech lawsuits, costing taxpayers thousands of dollars, with the schools usually on the losing end. School administrators need to take a deep breath and think outside the box a little.

My suggestion: Integrate blogging into English and writing classes. Teach kids what is appropriate, teach them good blogging writing styles, and encourage kids to write using these new tools. How about your school system? Have they used blog tools to help teach writing?

Yet another report indicates the most common electronic voting machine is vulnerable to tampering. Get this:

"If Diebold had set out to build a system as insecure as they possibly could, this would be it," says Avi Rubin, a Johns Hopkins University computer-science professor and elections-security expert.

Electronic voting machines were rushed into use after the 2000 national elections as a panacea to the hanging chad problem. Most alarming is that the machines can be easily fixed to alter votes in ways that are not obvious to the local government technicians responsible for managing the machines. The software in the machines can be rigged so that the machines will pass all pre-voting tests properly, but will still alter the results--and no one would know.

This is a classic example of relying on IT vendor problems without conducting any due diligence. What's even worse is that many local governments are now taking a "see no evil" approach to a real issue. The machines need to be returned to Diebold, the money should be refunded, and we need machines that produce an auditable paper trail--trivial to do.

In what has to be one of the worst advertising concepts ever, an apparently blind drunk group of French ad execs came up with the idea that billboards should be able to call you on your mobile phone. As you pass by a billboard, the billboard will send your phone a video ad that you can watch later. It is designed for urban environments where people are traveling on foot and on public transit.

This is designed as an opt-in service, meaning you have to sign up for it. Which of course begs the question, "Who in their right mind would ever agree to such a thing?" I can see it now...."Gosh, I am not yet barraged enough with ads on every surface and every medium I watch or listen to. I think I need more ads--more video ads that I will watch in my spare time."

Uh huh.

This is utterly incomprehensible. Who wants their phone filled up automatically with huge video files that they are going to sit down and watch later? In an average day traveling around a place like Paris or New York, even if the ads are targeted somewhat, you'd be flattened with the things. Here is the most scary part of this.

"...the means to interact with the world will be your mobile phone..."

I have an idea: Let's interact with the world with our eyes and ears and mouth. Let's put down the cellphones and the iPods and actually pay attention to the real world, not the made up world of crazed advertising execs who think everything worth watching or reading should be crammed onto a 2" fuzzy mobile phone screen.