Design with Intent | 2006 August

Spiked: When did ‘hanging around’ become a social problem?

By Dan Lockton ⋅ August 30, 2006 ⋅ One comment

Josie Appleton, at the always-interesting Spiked, takes a look at the increasing systemic hostility towards ‘young people in public places’ in the UK: ‘When did ‘hanging around’ become a social problem?’
As well as the Mosquito, much covered on this site (all posts; try out high frequency sounds for yourself), the article mentions the use [...]

The illusion of control

By Dan Lockton ⋅ August 30, 2006 ⋅ 4 comments

Scott Adams recounts an anecdote illustrating the ‘illusion of control’ and how important it is to many people – even to the extent that it is the single defining characteristic of mankind which one might use to explain human behaviour to aliens:
“The maintenance man is moving the thermostat in our office today. I started talking [...]

[off-topic] Self-referential search results

By Dan Lockton ⋅ August 30, 2006 ⋅ One comment

I don’t normally do ‘off-topic’ posts – in fact this is the first – but I just re-read the earlier post ‘Nice attitude‘ and clicked on the link ‘device to stop young people congregating‘ in the post, which links to an Orange search page which initially referred a visitor to this site.

‘Carmakers must tell buyers about black boxes’

By Dan Lockton ⋅ August 25, 2006 ⋅ 2 comments

According to Reuters,
“The [US] government will not require recorders in autos but said on Monday that car makers must tell consumers when technology that tracks speed, braking and other measurements is in the new vehicles they buy.

Dilemma of horns

By Dan Lockton ⋅ August 25, 2006 ⋅ Post a comment

I was woken up (along with, I expect, lots of others) at about 5am today by a driver sounding his/her horn in the road outside – an arrogant two-second burst – then another replying (perhaps) with a slightly feeble one-second tone. I don’t know why; there are often a lot of horns during the day [...]

The Privacy Ceiling

By Dan Lockton ⋅ August 22, 2006 ⋅ One comment

Scott Craver of the University of Binghamton has a very interesting post summarising the concept of a ‘privacy ceiling’:
“This is an economic limit on privacy violation by companies, owing to the liability of having too much information about (or control over) users.”
It’s the “control over users” that immediately makes this something especially relevant for [...]

Use of RFID in DRM

By Dan Lockton ⋅ August 22, 2006 ⋅ One comment

Via Dave Farber’s Interesting People, a brief New Scientist article outlines Sony’s continuing obsession with restricting and controlling its customers (the last one didn’t go too well):
“A patent filed by Sony last week suggests it may once again be considering preventing consumers making “too many” back-up copies of its CDs…
Sony’s latest idea is to place [...]

Ed Felten: DRM Wars, and ‘Property Rights Management’

By Dan Lockton ⋅ August 15, 2006 ⋅ 3 comments

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 proponents, from it being largely promoted as a tool to [...]

‘Breathalyser phone stops drinkers making embarrassing calls’ – LG LP4100

By Dan Lockton ⋅ August 15, 2006 ⋅ One comment

Image from kr.mobile.yahoo.com
Except that it doesn’t, by default – as the story in the Times mentions. You need to set it to block certain “numbers in the adddress book, such as former girlfriends or boyfriends, bosses, parents and kebab houses” when the built-in breathalyser detects that you are over the drink-drive limit.

Freedom to Tinker – The Freedom to Tinker with Freedom?

By Dan Lockton ⋅ August 4, 2006 ⋅ Post a comment

At Freedom to Tinker, David Robinson asks whether, in a world where DRM is presented to so many customers as a benefit (e.g. Microsoft’s Zune service), the public as a whole will be quite happy to trade away its freedom to tinker, whether the law needs to intervene in this, and on which side: [...]

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Archive for August, 2006