Posts filed under “Software”

F is for Fail

An utter and complete failure in the customer experience design department from his local ISP (screwing up everything from web from usability/security to phone support) led Douglas Mezzar to take things into his own hands. After 3 months, wasted hours and dollars, he exploits a weakness in their web form to do something he should have been able to do from the start.

Although Douglas Mezzer’s housemate had moved out many months ago, there was one recurring reminder of his prior residence: the monthly DSL bill from iiNet. Though Douglas had been paying on time every month, Douglas thought it’d be best if the bills came addressed to him instead of his former housemate. He figured it’d be a simple change that could all be accomplished through the self-service account management website.

After logging in, however, he ran into a bit of an issue. While he could change the address, phone number, email address, date of birth, and several other fields, the Firstname and Surname were disabled.

Not a big deal, Douglas figured, they have the customer service number listed right there.

An hour and a half of customer service calls later, he finally got a hold of someone who could help with the name change. After verifying his date of birth, mother’s maiden name, and inside leg measurements, the rep cheerfully informed him that they could change the name on the account.

“Of course,” the rep added, “there’s a small fee of $59, but we’ll just bill that to your account.”

“Wait wait,” Douglas interrupted, “$59 for a name change!?”

“Well yes,” the rep explained, “it’s a standard fee. There’s a whole process, you understand.”

Douglas begrudgingly agreed. After all, he did just tell iiNet that his housemate moved out; saying “thanks but no thanks, he’s actually moving back in now” didn’t seem so believable.

A couple weeks later, the bill duly arrived with an additional $59 “name change” fee attached. Its addressee, however, was still Douglas’s former housemate. No big deal, he figured, I’m sure the next one will come to me.

The next month’s bill came and it was still not addressed to him. Okay, fine, he thought, they’ll waste my time. They’ll take my money. But apparently, making the ten-second change is too hard!? He had no choice but to call back; it was now a matter of principle.

When Douglas logged back on to the customer portal to find the appropriate service number, a thought popped into his mind. What if, he thought to himself, hmmm… what if they were incredibly lazy in putting this web app together? Could I just edit the fields myself?

He loaded up his trusty Firebug plugin and Inspected the Firstname field. He clicked “Edit HTML”, replaced Joe’s name with his own, and removed the “disabled” tag.

He followed suit with the Surname field and clicked Save Changes. Surely this won’t work, he told himself, they’re an ISP; they wouldn’t be that stupid, right?

To his surprise, there were no errors and the fields now read “Douglas” and “Mezzer”. Figuring it was some goofy persistence thing, he logged out and logged back in. The account still said “Douglas Mezzer”. Could it have actually worked?

Yes, apparently. The following month’s bill was addressed to “Douglas Mezzer” and there wasn’t a “name change” fee to be found. Though, he did consider them sending them a bill for doing their job.

Get the full story, including screenshots, here: Connect Betterer - The Daily WTF

Every single (even moderately successful) web browser's logo has been round... Why?

HIstory of Web Browser Logos

The  most obvious explanation is that Internet Explorer had a round logo and, considering it enjoyed a 95% market share in 2002, everyone else fell in line (Netscape switched to their round logo after IE had already made massive gains). Secondly, with the importance of putting forth a world wide web vibe it seems logical that you would end up with a bunch of globes.

But what about Internet Explorer itself? Why are the IE and NCSA Mosaic logos round? Was it on a designer's whim? Considering these products were mostly if not entirely the work of engineers; it's a bit more practical than that.

When NCSA Mosaic came out in the 90's it was the first graphical web browser. With an accessible UI design, and killer features like icons, bookmarks and pictures, it's what really kick-started the online information revolution. It had a status indicator which was the logo itself. This indicator had to display indefinite progress, so it was basically an elaborate spinner. (e.g. the current Mac OS X beach ball or Windows spinning hourglass.) Spinners are circular in concept and dynamics, otherwise, they would be a progress bar or something else non-cyclical used to indicate definite progress.

Netscape and Microsoft followed suit with their graphical browsers. They implemented logo-based spinners in the upper-right corner of their browser interfaces to indicate page loading progress while we were staring at blank screens hooked to dial-up connections. That way you knew something was happening. The logo-as-spinner element has taken a backseat since then, but it seems like the marketing vocabulary for the web browser was set.

It's interesting to note that Opera, with the widest departure from the globular design trend (the only one with no blue, as well) is also the least successful of all the browsers here, despite recent gains on current fringe platforms like Nintendo Wii and mobile devices. A similar observation can be made about Mozilla's browser: eking along in obscurity for years, until finally releasing it's rounded-logo browser version. With it's new globular look, it quickly became the only serious challenge to Microsoft's dominance of this space. (Obviously these are cases of correlation, not causation. However, looking at the list with a designer's eye, it's hard to miss.)

It will be interesting to see what the first major web browser without a globular logo design will be, bu if the current slew of upstart browsers are an indication, we're in for quite a wait...

new-browser-logos

Oh, and apparently blue is just as worldly as the globular shape. ALL the logos in this post, except for Opera, contain blue/green of some sort. In fact, it's by far the dominant color in nearly all of them. Is this more IE worship? Probably: subconscious or blatant, imitation is still the sincerest form of flattery.

After all, what company wouldn't like to replicate IE's 2002 95% market dominance of the browser-space?

Links to the Browsers listed in this article:

• NCSA Mosaic
  
• Netscape Navigator
• Internet Explorer
• Opera
• Safari
• Firefox
• Chrome
• Flock
• Konqueror
• xB Browser
• Maxthon
• Camino

Is your brain about to explode due to your indecisiveness? You're in luck! I've found the perfect website to provide the help you need. Icantdeci.de is a free, anonymous, emergent decision resolution assistant tool. Simply enter your quandary and hit submit. Users all over the world will quickly vote on your option A or B. While they are deciding your fate, you get to vote on their dilemmas. You will be asked five questions before getting your result. If you just want to help with other user’s predicaments, click the "start answering" button.

Photoshop Interface on an Ad in a Berlin Subway

Captured by flickr user epoxy_: massive stickers of the Adobe Photoshop user interface are being splashed across posters in Berlin's subways. The original ad's intended appeal is to associate these images of beautiful women with a product, in this case their respective music albums. This is almost always a false assumption when seen in the advertising world. (Yes they helped create the albums, but these images have little to do with the reality of the album or the artist.) The slapped on stickers remind the viewer that they should actually associate images like this with digital manipulation technology- not whatever widget they're hawking.

In other news, water is still wet...

Users of Microsoft's Internet Explorer are being urged by experts to switch to a rival until a serious security flaw has been fixed.

The flaw in Microsoft's Internet Explorer could allow criminals to take control of people's computers and steal their passwords, internet experts say...

..."Microsoft is continuing its investigation of public reports of attacks against a new vulnerability in Internet Explorer," said [Secunia] in a security advisory alert about the flaw.

Microsoft says it has detected attacks against IE 7.0 but said the "underlying vulnerability" was present in all versions of the browser.

Other browsers, such as Firefox, Opera, Chrome, Safari, are not vulnerable to the flaw Microsoft has identified.

Serious security flaw found in IE - BBC

There's been a lot of loud belly-aching over the marketplace implications of the $0.99 price point's popularity in Apple's iPhone App Store. Well, Mobile Orchard blew all that out of the water yesterday. Check out the sales distribution of iPhone Apps sorted by price:

iPhone App Store Sales by price

Jeffry Zeldman on WebDesignInterviews.com:

...what's really going to drive standards awareness in the next months is the release of IE8. For the first time, IE will no longer support "IE-only" websites by default. Instead, it will support standards by default. Think about that. If you're a developer, and you've somehow managed to remain completely unaware of standards-based design, your IE-only website won't work in IE. Wow! Right? So what will you do?

If you plan to have a career, you'll start learning about standards-based design fast. (IE8 will support old-fashioned IE-only sites if you insert a tag in the head of each web page instructing the browser to do so, but that's merely to protect old sites; it's not a strategy you can pursue if you intend to create new sites.)

That's the big news where browsers and standards adoption are concerned.

He's right. IE's position as the dominant browser on the web combined with it's everlasting lack of support for web standards has created a unique bottleneck that's been hard, but not impossible, to ignore. The pressure for web standards that actually mean something has been building for years. That bottleneck is about to be opened wide and the aftermath will be painful on a grand scale.

Heads up, creatives! You're precious Mac's are (slightly) less secure than you thought. Two pieces of malware surfaced last week. From ZD net:

Two pieces of malicious software affecting Apple's Mac OS X appeared this week: a Trojan horse with the ability to download and install malicious code of an attacker's choice, and a hacker tool for creating backdoors, according to security vendors.

The Trojan — called 'OSX.RSPlug.D' by Intego, the Mac security specialist that discovered the threat — is a variant on an older piece of malicious code but with a new installer, Intego said.

"It is a downloader, and it contacts a remote server to download the files it installs," Intego said in an advisory. "This means that, in the future, the downloader may be able to install payloads [other] than the one it currently installs."

In other respects the Trojan is similar to previous versions of RSPlug, which first surfaced in October 2007, Intego said. It installs a piece of malicious code known as DNSChanger, which routes the user's internet traffic through a malicious DNS server, leading users to phishing websites or pages displaying advertisements.

The Trojan is found on porn websites posing as a codec needed to play video files, a technique used to trick the user into downloading and installing it.

Intego said OSX.RSPlug.D has been widely confused with a separate threat publicized this week by several security firms. That threat is called OSX.TrojanKit.Malez by Intego and OSX.Lamzev.A by other vendors, including Symantec and Trend Micro.

OSX.Lamzev.A is a hacker tool designed primarily to allow attackers to install backdoors in a user's system, according to Intego. However, the company dismissed the tool as a serious threat because a potential hacker has to have physical access to a system to install the backdoor.

"Unlike true malware and Trojan horses, OSX.TrojanKit.Malez requires that a hacker already have access to a Mac in order to install the code," Intego stated.

Other antivirus vendors noted that Lamzev could be disguised as a piece of legitimate software and used to trick users into creating the backdoor themselves.

Lamzev is not related to RSPlug, despite several high-profile reports confounding the two, Intego emphasized. "This hacker tool has nothing to do with the RSPlug Trojan horse," Intego stated.

The Mac platfrom has been virus-free for so long because it wasn't really a very worthy target. But now that OS X has cracked 8% market share, it seems like the hackers are coming around to the idea that the Apple pond is crowded enough to fish in. (This isn't surprising, security experts in just about any field will tell you that security through obscurity is not really security at all.)

Having said all that, this is stuff you have to give permission to, before it can install on your machine. So, keep your wits about you, and you should be alright.

Character Illustration by Squiggley Studios.

A US Army intelligence report has identified popular micro-blogging service, and web 2.0 darling, Twitter as a potential terrorist tool.

Minefield is fast, furious... and incomplete. But its Javascript engine leaves Google's Chrome and Webkit (Safari) in the dust. So what is Minefield? It's pre-release/alpha version of a development branch of the Firefox browser. I that sounds too complicated, it wouldn't be that much of a stretch to just call it Firefox 4 Alpha.

Sure, a lot of your plugins won't work, and certain websites will make the browser crash. (Truthfully, that doesn't make it all that much different from any other Mozilla upgrade I've run.) But if it's speed you want Minefield has it in spades.

Download the latest nightly Minefield build for Mac OS X, Linux, or Windows.