We’ve discussed deliberately splitting up articles to increase page views before – inspired by Jason Kottke – with some very insightful comments, but the technique used by the free file-hosting site Putfile goes way beyond simply inconveniencing the user. Most free hosting sites require multiple […]
All posts filed under “Software”
Sniffing out censorship
Image from News Sniffer News Sniffer‘s Revisionista monitors alterations to published news stories from a variety of sources by comparing RSS feeds, sometimes revealing subsequently redacted information or changes of opinion (e.g. note the removed phrase in the first paragraph of this story about Cuba). […]
Locking out IE users
UPDATE: The code being used is from the Explorer Destroyer project, which has an explanation of its rationale here. It’s worth noting that it’s not just ‘Get Firefox’, but ‘Get Firefox with the Google Toolbar’, hence the $1 referral fee… I’d much rather have Firefox […]
Epson messes up my day
My Epson Stylus Photo R1800’s been running low on ink in a couple of cartridges for a few days now. I’ve been putting off ordering them until this weekend. Now I find that when the printer believes a cartridge has reached 0%, it won’t print […]
Jakob Nielsen: ‘Evil’ design
This Guardian article from last year includes Jakob Nielsen discussing what he calls ‘evil design’, specifically in reference to the web: “”Evil design is where they stop you from doing what you are trying to do, like putting an advert over the top of the […]
Review: Made to Break by Giles Slade
Last month I mentioned some fascinating details on planned obsolescence gleaned from a review of Giles Slade‘s Made to Break: Technology and Obsolescence in America. Having now read the book for myself, here’s my review, including noteworthy ‘architectures of control’ examples and pertinent commentary. Slade […]
Mostly a mistake, partly a psychological experiment
Scott Carpenter of Moving To Freedom is (I think) the first person to comment on the fact that for the last 11 months, every time someone posts a comment on this blog, he or she has been redirected to www.danlockton.co.uk (my homepage) rather than returned […]
Another phone business model designed to frustrate the customer
In a similar vein to a recent mention of a Verizon trick which attempts to force the user to use an expensive data service to check e-mail, rather than the free built-in WiFi, Uninnovate discusses the (Sprint) LG Fusic which not only disables on-phone features […]
Speed control designed to help the user
Something with an interesting ‘forcing function’ story has been right in front of me all this time: the QWERTY keyboard, developed by Christopher Sholes and then Remington, with the intention of controlling the user’s behaviour. Until typists became proficient with the QWERTY system, the non-alphabetical […]
BoingBoing podcast – direct link
Here’s the direct link for that new BoingBoing podcast – www.archive.org/download/…/boingboingboing_1_64kb.mp3 . BB were almost the last people I’d expect to wrap up their audio in a Flash interface! Still, ‘View Source’ is a lot easier than having to use a Flash decompiler to extract […]
Locking users in by making it difficult to leave
Privacy International has a report, ‘Dumb Design or Dirty Tricks?‘ on the practice of a number of popular websites – most notably eBay and Amazon – of lacking an easy or obvious way for a user to delete his or her account: “Amazon provided the […]
Uninnovate – engineering products to do less
Image from uninnovate.com I’ve just come across a very interesting new blog, uninnovate.com, which focuses on the phenomenon of “engineering expensive features into a product for which there is no market demand in order to make the product do less.” The first few posts tackle […]
Some links: miscellaneous, pertinent to architectures of control
Ulises Mejias on ‘Confinement, Education and the Control Society’ – fascinating commentary on Deleuze’s societies of control and how the instant communication and ‘life-long learning’ potential (and, I guess, everyware) of the internet age may facilitate control and repression: “This is the paradox of social […]
Planned addiction as a method of control: a parasitic lock-in business model
The news that tobacco companies have increased the levels of nicotine in their brands over the last few years – especially those popular with certain groups – made me think further about architectures of control: “The amount of nicotine in most cigarettes rose an average […]
Ed Felten: DRM Wars, and ‘Property Rights Management’
At Freedom to Tinker, Ed Felten has posted a summary of a talk he gave at the Usenix Security Symposium, called “DRM Wars: The Next Generation”. The two installments so far (Part 1, Part 2) trace a possible trend in the (stated) intentions of DRM’s […]
DRM now the ‘biggest issue’ in preserving information for the future
The Guardian has an interview with Richard Masters, of the British Library’s digital objects management programme looking at the impact of technology on archiving. The usual worries about file formats, media incompatability and how to select what to preserve and what not to are discussed, […]