The content was innocent enough, but when they sent out the mailing, they made a critical error: they had pasted the entire mailing list of addresses into the Recipients field in their mail program. As a result, every parent had every other parent’s email address. Some never noticed, and others didn’t really care. Several were displeased about this breach of privacy and let the school know about it.

That individual had committed the same error as many friends and family do when they want to share a message with many people.

This social faux-pas is easy to prevent, so I include here a quick set of instructions on how to maintain your mailing list’s privacy when you have a large mailing to send out.

What’s the problem?

When you send an email to a few dozen people, you risk the following:

• Some people might be upset because you are passing their private email address around in public. Treat the email list as if it were a list of private phone numbers. Would you send such a list to everyone you know?
• You are exposing everyone on the list to an increased spam risk. If anyone has a virus-compromised email account or is a spammer themselves (perish the thought!), they will now have access to the entire list of your friends.
• It is quite possible that someone in the mailing list will click “reply all” and either send personal information meant for you to everyone else, or at least annoy the others on the list.

Keeping it Private

The solution is very simple:

• Put your own address in the To field.
• Put all of your friends’ addresses in the BCC field—Blind Carbon Copy.
• Compose and send your email.

Your friends will receive an email that contains only your address and their address; they cannot see any of the other names on the list, even if they were to dig into the gritty details of the email headers.

Have Consideration

When you send a message to a large mailing list, please

• Keep their email addresses private
• Edit out unnecessary content of forwarded messages
• Respect their wishes if they ask to be removed from your list
• Carefully consider if your mailing is appropriate for everyone in the group

In other words, don’t become a spammer in your friends’ eyes.

And I want to be able to treat a PDF file exactly as I would a sheaf of printed pages.

Then along comes someone who exploits yet another bug in someone’s PDF renderer. A few months ago Acrobat Reader was all over the news. Today I saw that all of the cool kids are jailbreaking their iPhones using a simple web site that exploits a PDF defect in mobile Safari in iOS4.

And if the slick website can inject code that does something as profound as jailbreaking your iPhone, it should be child’s play for a black hat to use the same thing to take over your iPhone and ring up millions of dollars of charges to some telephone extortion outfit in a remote part of Africa.

I guess all of the fancy PDF features are a double edged sword—recall that Active-X controls and DDT were both amazing and powerful when they were introduced, but the improper use of both have sullied their good names. I just hope that the goal of a pure paper replacement standard is not lost and that these events do not cause PDF to become a marginalized technology.

I have a nice iMac that I use daily; my wife has a MacBook Pro which she has taken quite a liking to. And I carry around my iPhone (she really couldn’t care less about smart phones). It looks like these devices all converge on and overlap the territory of the iPad. Again, what’s the point?

I walked into the Apple store last Monday expecting to enjoy a few minutes of playing around with an over-sized iPod Touch, and then walk out. Then it hit me: they did it again—they created a device, akin to the iPhone, that is so slick and easy to use that you must handle one and play with its features before you can truly understand.

Alex Payne put it quite nicely in his blog:

“Human-computer interaction has found a sweet spot on the iPad. It’s all the power of desktop computing, plus the valuable constraints of mobile devices, minus the limitations of both. It just makes sense. Use one for a couple hours and your desktop or laptop will seem clumsy, arbitrary, and bewildering. It is, simply, how (most) computing should be.

You can be as cooly aloof as you like about the device, but it won’t change the fact that it’s a fundamental step forward in computing. … [I]f you work in tech, you should spend some time with an iPad. If it doesn’t change the way you think about what you do, you’re either a genius or an idiot.”

— The Moderate’s Position on iPad Openness

He’s right, you know.

As soon as I held the device in my hands it was clear why this device has earned its own new niche that it was wedged into, between smart phones and laptops. The touch interaction that was so revolutionary with the iPhone has become more palpable, and more natural. I find myself gently sweeping my hand across the screen as I read the newspaper, watching the words gently glide by.

It really sank in when I looked at how my wife uses her MacBook Pro. She lays in bed with the machine in her lap, listening with headphones, as she goes through her email, listens to iTunes, searches out videos of old friends in Brazil posted on YouTube, and does some Google searches for whatever is on her mind. Meanwhile, the machine’s legendary thigh-roasting fans are running and she fidgets and fumbles with its bulk.

Everything she does with her MacBook is better with the iPad. It is more like a TV than a computer in the sense that you simply turn it on and choose what you want to do, with no knowledge of its internals. There are no fans blasting searing heat. The device is not cumbersome; she can curl up with it like a good book.

And it does Netflix.

What more could you want?

Well, there are few things I see right away that I would like, but for the most part I want more proper iPad apps. Old iPhone apps offer two equally unpleasant views: either you use the app in a horribly cropped iPhone-sized letterbox view, or the app is displayed in grotty pixelated full screen mode. Fortunately, folks are coming out with new iPad apps every day, some are even free upgrades if you own an app on the iPhone.

The first problem my wife will encounter (when I finally give her my iPad, as promised) is that she will want to print something from it. Printing doesn’t seem to be in the iPad’s repertoire. I have to admit that printing is a bit of a heavyweight for such a handy dandy device. She will still look at me and say “But it should be able to print.” And she’ll be right.

The second real issue I have with it is file management. There just is no simple way to move files onto an iPad: all file management is kludgy at best, usually involving iTunes. This was not so bad with the iPhone because our expectations are lower; after all, it is a cellphone first and foremost.

But the iPad is different. Its name screams “Documents” and begs us to flip pages with our bare hands. Why do all document transfers have to involve web browsers, email, and iTunes?

There are many different ways file management could be handled, but the way iPhones and iPads deal with documents and files is so un-Apple. This little bit of tarnish distracts from the beautiful polish of the device.

But I love it anyway

I can’t really criticize much more about my iPad. It does exactly what someone like my wife needs with little hassle, like a handheld flat-screen TV with cool features.

In other words, the iPad excels at being a computer for entertainment.

Check out some of the (currently) free newspaper apps. If you like Popular Science, drop a five-spot on their interactive magazine. You’ll like it.

And did I mention that it does Netflix?

Apparently this is not the case

It seems that the TSA has leaked their official document of airport security guidelines. ABC News says Online Posting Reveals a “How To” for Terrorists to Get Through Airport Security

A Rookie Mistake

Look at the screenshot of the document at the top of this post. Even though a certain part of the document has been blacked out, it is possible to select the text and copy/paste to find out what is hidden behind the black text.

What kinds of things are listed in this document?

• Photographs of all kinds of official ID cards. Ever wondered what a U.S. Senator’s ID card looks like?
• Procedures for calibrating equipment, such as where guns should be hidden for the testing and such.
• Guidelines for who gets searched and who doesn’t.
• Guidelines for what objects get searched and which don’t.
• And much much more!

In other words, this was a most unfortunate event.

See for yourself—ABC News (and others) have posted the document with redactions removed.

Easy as Pie

Here’s a screenshot of the original document, opened in Adobe Acrobat Professional.

As you can see, it was a trivial matter to use the TouchUp Object tool to gently slide the black rectangle off of the secret stuff (I have blurred the text here, though you can read it from ABC News if you wish).

If you are working with confidential documents that could potentially cause disaster if leaked, please learn how to redact your documents correctly!

But…

I think a couple of the pages in their long evaluation checklist must have stuck together, because they clearly missed the part of the process where someone was supposed to actually try to plug one of the darned things in behind a computer in a dark closet with fifteen other cables bound in knots any sailor would be proud of.

Granted, USB cables plug in much better than many of their predecessors, such as those round multi-pin connectors found on older mice and keyboards, but the specification left one tiny detail out that would have made an already good idea better…

Which Side is Up?

There is no clear way to tell which side goes up. That’s it. I tire of trying to distinguish the vague impression of the USB logo on one side of a cable in dim lighting. All they needed to do was require a small bump be present on the top side, in perfect thumb location.

[I]t is not obvious at a glance to the inexperienced user (or to a user without sight of the installation) which way around the connector goes, thus it is often necessary to try both ways. More often than not, however, the side of the connector with the trident logo should be on “top” or “toward” the user. Most manufacturers do not, however, make the trident easily visible or detectable by touch. (Wikipedia)

My answer to the problem?

You see it in the picture above. I stole a bottle of coral nail polish from my wife and I carefully paint dots or stripes on the corresponding bits of any kind of connector.

My wife complained about the difficulty of fitting the tiny USB connector in her cell phone, so I placed a big dot on the top side of that one (though I left the phone untouched). I have also given similar treatment to many other connectors in my home.

Life is too short to keep trying to figure out which side of a cable fits where. Put little dots on them and be done with it!