July 2009 General Meeting: Social Networking, Part 1
© Lawrence I. Charters
Washington Apple Pi Journal, Vol. 31, no. 5, September-October 2009, pp. 23-28.
Social networking is the latest rage. President Barack Obama, in part, won the presidency through the adroit use of social networking. Former Governor Sarah Palin used social networking – specifically, Twitter – to announce that she was resigning from office. Opposition leaders in Iran used social networking to protest repression by the government. Over 200 million people worldwide use FaceBook to join virtual communities praising Serenity (the movie), Boston (the band), Buddha (the philosopher), and Office Depot (the chain store).
But social networking existed before Facebook or Twitter, and the July General Meeting focused on Macintosh applications that were “social” long before it became fashionable. But first, there were…
Questions & Answers
The promised Q&A Panel of Experts did not materialize due to gravitational flux anomalies in the transporter tubes. So we faked it.
Q: Are there classes where you can learn about social networking?
A: Are there ever! Because it has a high profile in the news, social networking has spawned a massive industry, with its own conferences, conventions, classes, seminars, and workshops. Generally speaking, you should avoid all of them, unless they are free or under $25. Most of these classes, conferences, seminars and such can’t teach you, even for $2500, anything you can’t teach yourself by playing with these tools for an hour or two.
Local community colleges and libraries often have classes, for free or low cost, that might cover social networking tools. But do take care not to spend more for a class than the social networking tool costs, and most social networking tools are free.
Q: What about Lynda.com classes?
A: Lynda.com has absolutely superb tutorials on a great many things. The tutorials are arranged in nicely digestible clumps, with excellent, focused video presentations. However, Lynda.com shows you how to use specific software packages; the site has no tutorials on social networking, which is at best a vague name for a type of online tool and not a specific piece of software.
Q: Are there any dangers to social networking?
A: Of course. Generally speaking, be very careful about the audience for any particular social networking tool, and be very careful about what you disclose about yourself and your family. A recent scandal in Britain involved social networking tools and the new head of the British intelligence service, MI6. Prior to his appointment, Sir John Sawers was known as a British diplomat, one of those faceless men in gray who try to keep nations from bashing one another. His spouse, a schoolteacher, posted the usual items on Facebook about family and friends. These innocent postings became much more dangerous when it was announced Sawers would take over MI6 in November 2009, immediately making him and his family prime targets for terrorists everywhere.
Generally speaking, do not disclose anything on a social networking site that can be used for identity theft. If you give your name, for example, there is no need to give an accurate birth date. If you give your home city, there is no need to reveal your street address. Omit gender or nationality if you can; those who know you should be familiar with both. Be general about your current employment, especially if you work for the government. “Department of Defense” is nicely vague; “First Sergeant, 832nd Ordnance Battalion” is far too specific.
If you have minor children, you might wish to be vague about their names, where they go to school, what their hobbies might be, and pretty much anything and everything else. “Mother of three” should be enough to identify you without compromising the identity of your children.
One audience member noted such cautions apply to private firms as well. A general industry you work in (IT consulting or just “consulting) could be a safer choice than a specific company name. Providing a specific employer and years seniority could zero in on which unique “Brian Johnson” or “Beth Smith” you are. This same precaution, by the way, applies to online surveys, including those done by your employer. If you specify you are in finance and are male with 20 years experience, your “anonymous” survey may not be very anonymous if there are no other 20-year employees in finance of your gender.
Birth dates are important for identity theft, so: lie. Since many social networking sites work differently for those over 18, if you are an adult, make yourself much older. Born in 1955? Say you were born in 1918. Your friends should know better, but you’ll trip up a criminal attempting to take out loans in your name.
The most important security measure you can take is: pick a long password. It need not be hard to remember, but it should be: long. Twitter, for example, was hacked last year because the root password – the password controlling the entire site – was the word “awesome.” While some might think Twitter awesome, it was trivially easy to break in using a simple dictionary attack: try every word in a dictionary until you get a hit. Since “awesome” happens to start with an “a,” presumably this didn’t take too long.
Long passwords, however, can be both memorable and very, very difficult to break. “AwesomeTwitterific” has the virtue of being memorable, of mixed case, not in any dictionary, and 18 characters long. It can’t be broken using a dictionary attack, and a brute-force attack would take thousands of years.
Many corporations and government agencies advocate complex passwords, such as “Pre!Zhhu55” instead of “precious.” While the former is much harder to guess than the latter, it is still easier to break than “kittyisprecious” simply because it is shorter. Complex passwords also have the drawback of being easily forgotten, so – aim for long, not complex.
Q: Why are Macs more expensive than PCs?
A: They aren’t, except perhaps in sales price. The initial cost might seem higher, but you have to add a great deal to your average Windows box to make it safe and productive. Macs, for example, don’t require disk management tools (Disk Utility does amazing things, and comes with Mac OS X), don’t require programs to combat viruses, don’t require extra security packages (though it would be nice if more Mac users simply turned on the Mac OS X firewall…), don’t require add-on sound cards and drivers, video cards and drivers, etc.
Macs usually come with applications that people want and need, such as iLife, with its video, photo, DVD, and sound editing tools. They also tend to last much longer (every General Meeting brings out at least a few Mac OS 9 fans from the 1990s), so the life cycle cost — the cost of a machine before it needs to be replaced — is lower.
Q: Are Skype and iChat secure?
A: The answer given in the general meeting – that governments do, routinely, monitor calls to and from foreign nations using either Skype or iChat – is entirely true. Both iChat and Skye encrypt your login credentials. Beyond that…
After the meeting, this answer was challenged. Several people noted that Skype also claims to encrypt the conversation itself. True – but that doesn’t mean the on-the-fly encryption of a conversation is secure from government snooping. iChat is encrypted only if you have gone into your account’s Security settings and enabled encryption. And neither Skype nor iChat encryption works unless all parties to a conversation are encrypting their connection.
Since there are dozens of utilities to record Skype and iChat conversations, and store these conversations in nice, easy-to-transfer audio files, this is not the best medium for secrecy. So by all means encourage your terrorist and criminal friends to use either or both.
Q: I’m going to be moving from a Mac mini to an iMac. Should I let the Apple store migrate my files, let it happen “automatically” as part of the iMac’s initialization process, or do it by hand, manually, after the fact?
A: Each work. One advantage of the Apple store is that someone with experience will do the job, and presumably do it right. The big advantage of doing it yourself is that you learn something, and learning is always good.
As for doing it “automatically” or “by hand,” automatic is best, but not necessarily immediately after taking it out of the box. If you play with the new machine for an hour or two, and then use the Install disk to erase the machine and reinstall everything, you’ll not only learn if all the parts of your new machine are working, but also get to transfer your files from the Mac mini to the iMac as part of the initialization process after restoring the iMac. It doesn’t cost anything except time.
Q: Are there any problems with Mail in moving from an older operating system to Leopard?
A: Before Tiger (Mac OS X 10.4), Mail stored everything in one giant file structure. Starting with Tiger, Mail stores each message as a separate file. This was done to allow easier access to individual messages with Spotlight. In Mac OS X 10.4, this was a definite improvement, but it really shines in Mac OS X 10.5: Mail and Spotlight work together extremely smoothly.
As for problems, if you have a lot of mail in Mac OS X 10.3 or earlier, it takes a long time to sort things out when you first move to Mac OS X 10.4 or 10.5. So do something else for a few hours; after the initial “out of one, many” conversion, everything works nicely.
Q: When should you partition a hard drive?
A: Generally speaking, never is a good time. Partitioning used to make sense in the Mac OS 8 and 9 days, when the operating system got very sluggish when there were lots of files. But you can have literally hundreds of thousands of files in Mac OS X and not even be aware of the fact; the operating system doesn’t care, and neither should you.
Partitioning also leads to problems if you guess wrong. The most common wrong guess: making the boot partition too small. If you leave only 32 GB for booting, and installing a bunch of applications, you could easily run out of room. And at that point, the only “solution” is to reformat the drive without partitions, which is not much of a solution.
The one exception is video editing. If you capture high-definition video directly to disk, having a dedicated partition is handy. But the easiest way to accomplish this is with a separate drive, ideally a FireWire drive. If the FireWire drive gets cluttered, it is easy enough to copy everything elsewhere and reformat the drive.
Q: What about disk drive defragmenting utilities?
A: If you reformat a drive, you defragment it. On the other hand, if you defragment a drive using a utility, you are betting that your file system is in perfect health, and that the utility will move everything around – perfectly – with a perfect understanding of your file structures, permissions, and the power company’s ability to provide perfect power. One wrong step at any point destroys everything on the drive, without hope of recovery.
Q: What kind of third-party utilities do you recommend?
A: Generally speaking, most users will never need any kind of special utility that doesn’t already come with their Mac. Disk optimizer? No. Anti-virus? Not usually. Anti-spyware? Nope.
A classic case was a recent discussion at a meeting about AppleJack. AppleJack is a command-line utility for Mac OS X that does – well, the user wasn’t sure, but had been told they needed it. The opposite is true: if it didn’t come with your Mac, and you don’t know what it does, you probably don’t need it.
One exception to this rule is Tech Tool Deluxe. Tech Tool Deluxe is included on the AppleCare discs you get when you buy AppleCare, and provides a nice suite of tools for checking your hard drive, video, memory, sound, etc. It is easy to understand, easy to use, and offers excellent technical explanations of what it is doing at any given time.
Q: I have problems plugging in FireWire drives. Shouldn’t I be able to do that?
A: Plugging in a FireWire drive, if you have a FireWire port, should be easy. What is often difficult is daisy-chaining FireWire drives. Because of incompatible FireWire bridge chips, or overtaxed power supplies, or some combination of the two, daisy-chaining multiple FireWire devices can sometimes make all the devices seem unreliable. When in trouble, connect them one at a time and see if you can find the culprit.
LaCie, Iomega, and Western Digital enclosures seem to generate a large number of complaints when it comes to daisy-chaining, while Seagate, OWC, and NewerTech tend to get good reviews. But don’t guess: if you are having problems, plug in one drive at a time until you identify the problem.
While not part of the formal Q&A, one question was about drive recommendations. When it comes to bare drives, Seagate drives have a five-year warranty, and are generally considered the industry standard. Western Digital’s Caviar “green” drives, on the other hand, are also getting good reviews, and use up to 40% less electricity than similarly configured drives. Caution: many vendors are selling “green” drives that are green only because some part of the case is colored green, so be cautious. Color is not an indicator of energy savings.
Social Networking, Part I
July’s main topic was social networking, which really isn’t a topic at all but a constellation of topics. Web 2.0, social media, new media, Web applications, etc., have all been used to describe social media. Trying to come up with a definition that suits everyone is difficult, but at the meeting, this definition was offered:
A social structure made of individuals or organizations that are tied by one or more specific types of interdependency, such as kinship, friendship or work associations.
This isn’t a bad definition, but it misses the element of technology that makes “social media” the phenomenon we know today: social media is a set of Web-based technologies that allow individuals to share and interact. Most Web sites do not offer any means of “sharing” anything or interacting. The Pi Web site, for example, is a one-to-many type of communications tool: the Pi (one) disseminates information out to the world (the many). On the other hand, the Pi’s forums, the TCS, is a many-to-many communications tool: many people write messages, and many more respond, and an even larger number reads the result without writing anything.
The most important part of the social media phenomenon is the word: Web. Virtually every personal computer in the world is connected to the Internet, if not directly via a broadband connection then indirectly through a modem. Additionally, tens of millions of “smart phones” can connect to the Internet as well. And through just one part of the Internet – the World Wide Web – a couple of billion people, in every country of the world, can interact using nothing more than their computer and a Web browser.
The most successful example of social networking today is YouTube. Each day, more original video material is uploaded to YouTube than all the television networks produce, worldwide, in a year. The vast majority of the video is derivative or worse, but each day an astonishing amount of original, vibrant, compelling material is posted. These postings are viewed, commented on, rated, and shared with hundreds of millions of people.
The Mac has been in the social networking business since before “social networking” was a recognized term. AppleLink went online in 1985 as a means of sharing information among Apple employees and dealers, and eventually to user groups. While used mostly for E-mail, it had a pseudo-Mac “desktop” that allowed users to drag around files. AppleLink was used to send the first E-mail to outer space, sending a message to the crew of STS-43 on the shuttle Atlantis in 1991. AppleLink gave way to eWorld, which lived for a few years before eventually being killed by the Internet and the World Wide Web.
After a few years, Apple returned to electronic services with the introduction of .Mac in January 2000. While it wasn’t billed as social media, the service did allow you to have your own .mac E-mail address, online storage, a Web site, and iCards that you could send out to friends, enemies, family members, and anybody else you wished.
The rise of iTunes, iPhoto, and iWeb turned .Mac into a major social media hub, as Mac users could create elaborate, elegant Web-based photo galleries as well as conventional Web sites. iTunes, of course, was not just a store for buying music, but a way of converting your CDs into files on your computer that you could then incorporate into slideshows or theme music for personal DVDs. The iTunes Store published celebrity playlists of what the rich and famous were listening to on their iPods, and you could rate and comment on songs purchased through the iTunes Store.
Social Networking with Apple Applications
Larry Kerschberg discussed social networking in the context of Apple applications: Mail, iLife, and iChat, and Apple’s network service, MobileMe. Electronic mail is essentially a “social networking” tool as it is designed to bring people, projects and ideas together via electronic mail. Apple Mail, with its strong tools for sorting, searching, and filing messages, and showing message threads, is admirably suited to this task. If Apple Mail detects that a given user is online with iChat, it even flags this in Apple Mail with a green dot next to their name, allowing you to switch from text-based interchanges to free-form, interactive speech.
MobileMe, the revised .Mac service, has greatly expanded social networking tools. The Web-based versions of Apple Mail, Address Book, and iCal closely resemble the desktop applications, and integrate seamlessly. Sync services allow multiple Macs to have access to the same E-mail, the same contacts, and the same calendar information. With the proper equipment and an agreeable ISP (Internet Service Provider), you can even remotely login to your Mac at your home or office via Back to My Mac and MobileMe. Finally, Find My iPhone allows you to find your iPhone if it is lost around your house or office, or remotely wipe it if some ne’er-do-well absconded with it.
iTunes can also be used for playing music among several machines on a local area network, giving new meaning to “social networking.” The iTunes Store has been gradually building up iTunes University as a major educational force, with thousands of free courses offered by universities, non-profits, and government agencies covering every topic imaginable.
Then there is the iTunes App Store, which in a little over two years has managed to confuse all the careful lines of demarcation between what you could do with a computer and what you could do with a phone, or an iPod. An iPhone either comes with, or can freely add, applications to update a MobileMe photo gallery, add a video to a MobileMe site, update your Facebook status, send or receive a tweet on Twitter, and 60,000-odd other things. You can even be old-fashioned and use it as a phone.
iPhoto galleries can be published with literally the press of a button. You can share these photos not only on your MobileMe Web site, but also on Flickr and Facebook. If you have relatives with modest online skills, you can also print out photo books, calendars, and cards directly from iPhoto.
iWeb, part of iWork, is a full Web development application. You can use it to not only create complex Web sites, but also blogs, complete with RSS (Really Simple Syndication) feeds, and it offers some photo gallery options not present in iPhoto.
iChat, included as a standard part of Mac OS X since 10.3, can be used for simultaneously talking to up to 10 users at once, using text, sound, video, or a combination of all three. You can also use it for transferring files and photos, and even share your desktop.
Even though most of these applications are not new, Larry’s presentation was continually punctuated with questions and exclamations of “I didn’t know that.” The depth and breadth of Apple’s everyday applications excited the audience; the many laptops in evidence were kept quite busy as users followed Larry’s every move with experiments of their own.
Skype
Bob Jarecke talked a bit about Skype, which is similar to iChat (it is an instant messaging application that supports text, video, and sound), but is marketed as a telephone service. Developed by programmers from Estonia, it was incorporated as a Swedish company, headquartered in Luxembourg, and set up offices around Europe. Eventually, it was purchased by eBay, which so far hasn’t found any great reason to keep it and has said it will spin it off into an independent company next year. Origins and company politics aside, Skype is a worldwide hit.
Unlike iChat, Skype is available for Windows, Macs, and Linux. The free version allows you to chat with anybody in the world that is online and that also has a Skype account. If Skype is running on their computer but they are doing something else, an incoming Skype connection rings a bell that sounds like an old-fashioned telephone. You can talk for hours on end, for free.
Many people also opt for using Skype as a regular phone service. The paid version of Skype will ring a regular telephone, wired or wireless. Generally speaking, international long-distance rates, in particular, are much less expensive via Skype than regular commercial telephone calls. Since Skype runs over Internet connections, there are occasional strange pauses and dropouts due to network saturation, and sometimes you can get an audio-only connection instead of audio and video. But despite the limitations, Skype is undeniably a hit, and without much fanfare has become one of the largest “phone companies” in the world.
Next Month: Part II
The meeting did not run out of steam, but it did run out of time. Even though the content was limited to just Apple applications and Skype, the level of interest was so great that sometimes the avalanche of questions threatened to derail the presentations. So in August, there will be a Part II, focusing on Facebook and Twitter.