technology

3000 ravers, dancing in silence

commonplace book, technology, weird / /

From The Sydney Morning Herald‘s’ “Clubbers to get into the silent groove“:

For those seeking tranquillity at Glastonbury Festival, a dance tent packed with clubbers is not an obvious sanctuary. But this will be the silent disco – 3000 festivalgoers are to be issued with headphones this year so they can turn up the volume without waking the neighbours.

The quietest party in town is a response to the problem of noise pollution at the festival, which has traditionally led the district council to issue a licence on the condition that the festival’s main stages and tents shut down on the stroke of midnight.

This year, the council is to grant a late licence for the new dance area on the condition that thumping beats and pounding basslines are put to bed at 12. But, thanks to Glastonbury technicians, clubbers won’t have to. For one night only, they will be given wireless headphones, so they don’t trip up when dancing to whatever record the DJ plays.

“I like the idea of people dancing in total silence,” said Emily Eavis, one of the festival organisers and daughter of the founder Michael Eavis. “Imagine if you were feeling a bit worse for wear and thought, ‘This would be a nice quiet place to sit down’.
AdvertisementAdvertisement

“You would be completely freaked out to see 3000 people dancing in silence. It’s certainly quirky, but our big push this year is keeping the noise down because that’s what the council is keen on.”

3000 ravers, dancing in silence Read More »

Projecting a murdered woman’s image on a building

commonplace book, security, tech in changing society, technology / /

From BBC News’ “Police go big with victim picture“:

Murdered Prostitute A 60ft high picture of a murdered prostitute has been projected onto a derelict block of flats in Glasgow.

Detectives hope it will help to turn up clues about the death of Emma Caldwell, whose body was found in woods in South Lanarkshire on 8 May.

The image was displayed for four hours on the multi-storey flats in Cumberland Street, Hutchesontown on Monday night.

Police said the site had been chosen as it was visible across areas frequented by Emma and other prostitutes.

Projecting a murdered woman’s image on a building Read More »

What’s a socio-technical system?

commonplace book, social software, tech in changing society, technology / /

From Ulises Ali Mejias’ “A del.icio.us study: Bookmark, Classify and Share: A mini-ethnography of social practices in a distributed classification community“:

A socio-technical system is conformed of hardware, software, physical surroundings, people, procedures, laws and regulations, and data and data structures.

What’s a socio-technical system? Read More »

Thoughts on tagging/folksonomy

social software, tech in changing society, technology / /

From Ulises Ali Mejias’ “A del.icio.us study: Bookmark, Classify and Share: A mini-ethnography of social practices in a distributed classification community“:

This principle of distribution is at work in socio-technical systems that allow users to collaboratively organize a shared set of resources by assigning classifiers, or tags, to each item. The practice is coming to be known as free tagging, open tagging, ethnoclassification, folksonomy, or faceted hierarchy (henceforth referred to in this study as distributed classification) …

One important feature of systems such as these is that they do not impose a rigid taxonomy. Instead, they allow users to assign whatever classifiers they choose. Although this might sound counter-productive to the ultimate goal of organizing content, in practice it seems to work rather well, although it does present some drawbacks. For example, most people will probably classify pictures of cats by using the tag ‘cats.’ But what happens when some individuals use ‘cat’ or ‘feline’ or ‘meowmeow’ …

It seems that while most people might not be motivated to contribute to a pre-established system of classification that may not meet their needs, or to devise new and complex taxonomies of their own, they are quite happy to use distributed systems of classification that are quick and able to accommodate their personal (and ever changing) systems of classification. …

But distributed classification does not accrue benefits only to the individual. It is a very social endeavor in which the community as a whole can benefit. Jon Udell describes some of the individual and social possibilities of this method of classification:

These systems offer lots of ways to visualize and refine the tag space. It’s easy to know whether a tag you’ve used is unique or, conversely, popular. It’s easy to rename a tag across a set of items. It’s easy to perform queries that combine tags. Armed with such powerful tools, people can collectively enrich shared data. (Udell 2004) …

Set this [an imposed taxonomy] against the idea of allowing a user to add tags to any given document in the corpus. Like Del.icio.us, there needn’t be a pre-defined hierarchy or lexicon of terms to use; one can simply lean on the power of ethnoclassification to build that lexicon dynamically. As such, it will dynamically evolve as usages change and shift, even as needs change and shift. (Williams, 2004)

The primary benefit of free tagging is that we know the classification makes sense to users… For a content creator who is uploading information into such a system, being able to freely list subjects, instead of choosing from a pre-approved “pick list,” makes tagging content much easier. This, in turn, makes it more likely that users will take time to classify their contributions. (Merholz, 2004)

Folksonomies work best when a number of users all describe the same piece of information. For instance, on del.icio.us, many people have bookmarked wikipedia (http://del.icio.us/url/bca8b85b54a7e6c01a1bcfaf15be1df5), each with a different set of words to describe it. Among the various tags used, del.icio.us shows that reference, wiki, and encyclopedia are the most popular. (Wikipedia entry for folksonomy, retrieved December 15, 2004 from http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Folksonomy)

Of course, this approach is not without its potential problems:

With no one controlling the vocabulary, users develop multiple terms for identical concepts. For example, if you want to find all references to New York City on Del.icio.us, you’ll have to look through “nyc,” “newyork,” and “newyorkcity.” You may also encounter the inverse problem — users employing the same term for disparate concepts. (Merholz, 2004) …

But as Clay Shirky remarks, this solution might diminish some of the benefits that we can derive from folksonomies:

Synonym control is not as wonderful as is often supposed, because synonyms often aren’t. Even closely related terms like movies, films, flicks, and cinema cannot be trivially collapsed into a single word without loss of meaning, and of social context … (Shirky, 2004) …

The choice of tags [in the entire del.icio.us system] follows something resembling the Zipf or power law curve often seen in web-related traffic. Just six tags (python, delicious/del.icio.us, programming, hacks, tools, and web) account for 80% of all the tags chosen, and a long tail of 58 other tags make up the remaining 20%, with most occurring just once or twice … In the del.icio.us community, the rich get richer and the poor stay poor via http://del.icio.us/popular. Links noted by enough users within a short space of time get listed here, and many del.icio.us users use it to keep up with the zeitgeist. (Biddulph, 2004) …

Thoughts on tagging/folksonomy Read More »

Bring down the cell network with SMS spam

security, tech in changing society, technology / /

From John Schwartz’s “Text Hackers Could Jam Cellphones, a Paper Says“:

Malicious hackers could take down cellular networks in large cities by inundating their popular text-messaging services with the equivalent of spam, said computer security researchers, who will announce the findings of their research today.

Such an attack is possible, the researchers say, because cellphone companies provide the text-messaging service to their networks in a way that could allow an attacker who jams the message system to disable the voice network as well.

And because the message services are accessible through the Internet, cellular networks are open to the denial-of-service attacks that occur regularly online, in which computers send so many messages or commands to a target that the rogue data blocks other machines from connecting.

By pushing 165 messages a second into the network, said Patrick D. McDaniel, a professor of computer science and engineering at Pennsylvania State University and the lead researcher on the paper, “you can congest all of Manhattan.”

Also see http://www.smsanalysis.org/.

Bring down the cell network with SMS spam Read More »

The difficulty of recovering from identity theft

business, security, tech in changing society, technology / /

From TechWeb News’s “One In Four Identity-Theft Victims Never Fully Recover“:

Making things right after a stolen identity can take months and cost thousands, a survey of identity theft victims released Tuesday said. Worse, in more than one in four cases, victims haven’t been able to completely restore their good name.

The survey, conducted by Nationwide Mutual Insurance Co., found that 28 percent of identity thieves’ marks aren’t able to reconstruct their identities even after more than a year of work. On average, victims spent 81 hours trying to resolve their case.

According to the poll, the average amount of total charges made using a victim’s identity was $3,968. Fortunately, most were not held responsible for the fraudulent charges; 16 percent, however, reported that they had to pay for some or all of the bogus purchases.

Other results posted by the survey were just as dispiriting. More than half of the victims discovered the theft on their own by noticing unusual charges on credit cards or depleted bank accounts, but that took time: on average, five and a half months passed between when the theft occurred and when it was spotted.

Only 17 percent were notified by a creditor or financial institution of suspicious activity, a figure that’s certain to fuel federal lawmakers pondering legislation that would require public disclosure of large data breaches.

The difficulty of recovering from identity theft Read More »

Laws & enforcement in virtual worlds

commonplace book, politics, social software, tech in changing society, technology, writing ideas / /

From James Grimmelmann’s “Life, Death, and Democracy Online“:

… The necessity of a ‘Quit’ option is obvious; no adventure game yet invented can force an unwilling player to continue playing. She can always give the game the three-finger salute, flip the power switch, or throw her computer in the junk heap. …

Banishment is the absolute worst punishment any multi-player online role-playing game can impose on a player. Which is to say that a painless execution is the absolute worst punishment any game society can impose on the characters who are its citizens. Torture is not an option. Imprisonment and fines can be imposed, true, but as soon as the player behind the character finds that these punishments are too onerous, she can simply terminate her account and stop logging in; the rest of the deterrent value of the punishment evaporates. It’s hard to hold characters accountable.

Laws & enforcement in virtual worlds Read More »

A game completely controlled by the players

commonplace book, education, social software, tech in changing society, technology / /

From Ron Dulin’s “A Tale in the Desert“:

A Tale in the Desert is set in ancient Egypt. Very ancient Egypt: The only society to be found is that which has been created by the existing players. Your mentor will show you how to gather materials and show you the basics of learning and construction. These are the primary goals in the game–you learn from academies and universities, and then you use what you’ve learned to build things, such as structures and tools. As your character learns new skills, you can advance. …

Higher-level tests are much more complex and require you to enlist lower-level characters to help you complete them. Players are directly involved in almost all aspects of the game, from the introduction of new technologies to the game’s rules to the landscape itself. With a few exceptions, almost every structure you see in the game was built by a player or group of players. New technologies are introduced through research at universities, which is aided by players’ donations to these institutions. Most interestingly, though, the game rules themselves can be changed through the legal system. If you don’t like a certain aspect of the game, within reason, you can introduce a petition to have it changed. If you get enough signatures on your petition, it will be subject to a general vote. If it passes, it becomes a new law. This system is also used for permanently banning players who have, for some reason or another, made other players’ in-game lives difficult. …

The designers themselves have stated that A Tale in the Desert is about creating a society, and watching the experiment in action is almost as enjoyable as taking part.

A game completely controlled by the players Read More »

Computer commands as incantations

commonplace book, language & literature, social software, tech in changing society, technology, writing ideas / /

From Julian Dibbell’s “A Rape in Cyberspace: How an Evil Clown, a Haitian Trickster Spirit, Two Wizards, and a Cast of Dozens Turned a Database Into a Society“:

After all, anyone the least bit familiar with the workings of the new era’s definitive technology, the computer, knows that it operates on a principle impracticably difficult to distinguish from the pre-Enlightenment principle of the magic word: the commands you type into a computer are a kind of speech that doesn’t so much communicate as make things happen, directly and ineluctably, the same way pulling a trigger does. They are incantations, in other words, and anyone at all attuned to the technosocial megatrends of the moment — from the growing dependence of economies on the global flow of intensely fetishized words and numbers to the burgeoning ability of bioengineers to speak the spells written in the four-letter text of DNA — knows that the logic of the incantation is rapidly permeating the fabric of our lives.

Computer commands as incantations Read More »

Recognizing futility

history, language & literature, technology / /

From Shelby Foote’s The Civil War: Fort Sumter to Perryville (261):

[On 9 March 1862, the world’s first battle between ironclad warships took place. The smaller and nimbler Monitor was able to outmaneuver Virginia, but neither ship proved able to do significant damage to the other. Catesby Jones, commander of the Virginia] gave the Monitor everything he had given the wooden warships yesterday, and more: to no avail. When he tried to ram her, she drew aside like a skillful boxer and pounded him hard as he passed. After a few such exchanges, the crews of his after-guns, deafened by the concussion of 180-pound balls against the cracking railroad iron, were bleeding from their noses and ears. Descending once to the gundeck and observing that some of the pieces were not engaged, Jones shouted: “Why are you not firing. Mr. Eggleston?” The gun captain shrugged. “Why, our powder is very precious,” he replied, “and after two hours incessant firing I find that I can do her just about as much damage by snapping my thumb at her every two minutes and a half.”

Recognizing futility Read More »

Users know how to create good passwords, but they don’t

business, security, technology / /

From Usability News’ “Password Security: What Users Know and What They Actually Do“:

A total of 328 undergraduate and graduate level college students from Wichita State University volunteered to participate in the survey, and were regular users of the Internet with one or more password protected accounts. Ages of the participants ranged from 18 to 58 years (M = 25.34). Thirteen cases were deleted due to missing data, resulting in 315 participants in the final data analysis. …

When asked what practices should be used in the creation and usage of passwords, the majority of respondents, 50.8% (160), were able to identify most of the password practices that are recommended for creating secure passwords (Tufts University, 2005), although 62.9% (198) failed to identify a practice that would result in the most secure password; using numbers and special characters in place of letters.

Differences between password practices users reported and the passwords practices they believe they should use included:

  • 73% (230) of respondents reported that they should change their passwords for accounts every three to six months, but 52.7% (166) responded that they “Never” change their password when not required.
  • 50.8% (160) of respondents reported that they should use special characters in their passwords, but only 4.8% (12) reported doing so.
  • 63.5% (200) of respondents reported that they should use seven or more characters in their passwords, but only 35.5% (112) indicated that they use this number of characters with any regularity.
  • 70.5% (222) of respondents indicated that personally meaningful words should not be used, but 49.8% (156) reported that they use this practice.
  • 68.3% (215) of respondents report that personally meaningful numbers should not be used in passwords, but 54.9% (173) reported using this practice. …

The majority of participants in the current study most commonly reported password generation practices that are simplistic and hence very insecure. Particular practices reported include using lowercase letters, numbers or digits, personally meaningful words and numbers (e.g., dates). It is widely known that users typically use birthdates, anniversary dates, telephone numbers, license plate numbers, social security numbers, street addresses, apartment numbers, etc. Likewise, personally meaningful words are typically derived from predictable areas and interests in the person’s life and could be guessed through basic knowledge of his or her interests. …

It would seem to be a logical assumption that the practices and behaviors users engage in would be related to what they think they should do in order to create secure passwords. This does not seem to be the case as participants in the current study were able to identify many of the recommended practices, despite the fact that they did not use the practices themselves.

Users know how to create good passwords, but they don’t Read More »

The Sumitomo Mitsuibank bank heist

business, security, technology / /

From Richard Stiennon’s “Lessons Learned from Biggest Bank Heist in History“:

Last year’s news that thieves had managed to break in to Sumitomo Mitsui Bank’s branch in London and attempt to transfer almost $440 million to accounts in other countries should give CIO’s cause for concern. …

First a recap. Last year it came to light that U.K. authorities had put the kibosh on what would have been the largest bank heist in history.

The story is still developing but this is what we know: Thieves masquerading as cleaning staff with the help of a security guard installed hardware keystroke loggers on computers within the London branch of Sumitomo Mitsui, a huge Japanese bank.

These computers evidently belonged to help desk personnel. The keystroke loggers captured everything typed into the computer including, of course, administrative passwords for remote access.

By installing software keystroke loggers on the PCs that belonged to the bank personnel responsible for wire transfers over the SWIFT (Society for Worldwide Interbank Financial Telecommunication) network, the thieves captured credentials that were then used to transfer 220 million pounds (call it half-a-billion dollars).

Luckily the police were involved by that time and were able to stymie the attack.

From Richard Stiennon’s “Super-Glue: Best practice for countering key stroke loggers“:

… it is reported that Sumitomo Bank’s best practice for avoiding a repeat attack is that they now super-glue the keyboard connections into the backs of their PCs.

The Sumitomo Mitsuibank bank heist Read More »

10 early choices that helped make the Internet successful

business, history, science, social software, tech in changing society, technology / /

From Dan Gillmor’s “10 choices that were critical to the Net’s success“:

1) Make it all work on top of existing networks.

2) Use packets, not circuits.

3) Create a ‘routing’ function.

4) Split the Transmission Control Protocol (TCP) and Internet Protocol (IP) …

5) The National Science Foundation (NSF) funds the University of California-Berkeley, to put TCP/IP into the Unix operating system originally developed by AT&T.

6) CSNET, an early network used by universities, connects with the ARPANET … The connection was for e-mail only, but it led to much more university research on networks and a more general understanding among students, faculty and staff of the value of internetworking.

7) The NSF requires users of the NSFNET to use TCP/IP, not competing protocols.

8) International telecommunications standards bodies reject TCP/IP, then create a separate standard called OSI.

9) The NSF creates an “Acceptable Use Policy” restricting NSFNET use to noncommercial activities.

10) Once things start to build, government stays mostly out of the way.

10 early choices that helped make the Internet successful Read More »

Early attempts to control phone usage

business, history, social software, tech in changing society, technology / /

From R. W. Kostal’s Law and English Railway Capitalism, 1825-1875 (quoted in Andrew Odlyzko’s “Pricing and Architecture of the Internet: Historical Perspectives from Telecommunications and Transportation“):

In Britain in 1889, postal officials reprimanded a Leicester subscriber for using his phone to notify the fire brigade of a nearby conflagration. The fire was not on his premises, and his contract directed him to confine his telephone “to his own business and private affairs.” The Leicester Town Council, Chamber of Commerce, and Trade Protection Society all appealed to the postmaster-general, who ruled that the use of the telephone to convey intelligence of fires and riots would be permitted thenceforth.

Early attempts to control phone usage Read More »

Flat local calling rates in US helped grow the Net

business, history, tech in changing society, technology / /

From Andrew Odlyzko’s “Pricing and Architecture of the Internet: Historical Perspectives from Telecommunications and Transportation“:

Moreover, flat rates for local calling played a key role in the rise of the Internet, by promoting much faster spread of this technology in the U.S. than in other countries. (This, as well as the FCC decisions about keeping Internet calls free from access charges, should surely be added to the list of “the 10 key choices that were critical to the Net’s success,” that were compiled by Scott Bradner [28].)

Flat local calling rates in US helped grow the Net Read More »

Monopolies & Internet innovation

business, history, tech in changing society, technology / /

From Andrew Odlyzko’s “Pricing and Architecture of the Internet: Historical Perspectives from Telecommunications and Transportation“:

The power to price discriminate, especially for a monopolist, is like the power of taxation, something that can be used to destroy. There are many governments that are interested in controlling Internet traffic for political or other reasons, and are interfering (with various degrees of success) with the end-to-end principle. However, in most democratic societies, the pressure to change the architecture of the Internet is coming primarily from economic concerns, trying to extract more revenues from users. This does not necessarily threaten political liberty, but it does impede innovation. If some new protocol or service is invented, gains from its use could be appropriated by the carriers if they could impose special charges for it.

The power of price discrimination was well understood in ancient times, even if the economic concept was not defined. As the many historical vignettes presented before show, differential pricing was frequently allowed, but only to a controlled degree. The main con- cern in the early days was about general fairness and about service providers leveraging their control of a key facility into control over other businesses. Personal discrimination was particularly hated, and preference was given to general rules applying to broad classes (such as student or senior citizen discounts today). Very often bounds on charges were imposed to limit price discrimination. …

Openness, non-discrimination, and the end-to-end principle have contributed greatly to the success of the Internet, by allowing innovation to flourish. Service providers have traditionally been very poor in introducing services that mattered and even in forecasting where their profits would come from. Sometimes this was because of ignorance, as in the failure of WAP and success of SMS, both of which came as great surprises to the wireless industry, even though this should have been the easiest thing to predict [55]. Sometimes it was because the industry tried to control usage excessively. For example, services such as Minitel have turned out to be disappointments for their proponents largely because of the built-in limitations. We can also recall the attempts by the local telephone monopolies in the mid-to late-1990s to impose special fees on Internet access calls. Various studies were trotted out about the harm that long Internet calls were causing to the network. In retrospect, though, Internet access was a key source of the increased revenues and profits at the local telcos in the late 1990s. Since the main value of the phone was its accessibility at any time, long Internet calls led to installation of second lines that were highly profitable for service providers. (The average length of time that a phone line was in use remained remarkably constant during that period [49].)

Much of the progress in telecommunications over the last couple of decades was due to innovations by users. The “killer apps” on the Internet, email, Web, browser, search engines, and Napster, were all invented by end users, not by carriers. (Even email was specifically not designed into the ARPANET, the progenitor of the Internet, and its dominance came as a surprise [55].)

Monopolies & Internet innovation Read More »

Railroads & tolls

business, history, tech in changing society, technology / /

From Andrew Odlyzko’s “Pricing and Architecture of the Internet: Historical Perspectives from Telecommunications and Transportation“:

Railroads were the dominant industry of the 19th century. … Early railroad charters, in both England and the U.S., were modeled after canal and turnpike charters, and almost uniformly envisaged that railroad companies would not be carriers themselves. Instead, they were expected to offer their facilities for use by carriers that would carry goods and passengers in their own wagons over the rails. Still, these charters specified tolls that varied greatly depending on the nature of the cargo. … For example, the very first parliamentary act for a railway was enacted in 1801. (Previous railways had been on private property, but in this case, as in subsequent ones, promoters were asking for the right of eminent domain to acquire the necessary land.) Between the endpoints of the railway, “chalk, lime and other manures were charged at the rate of three-pence per ton per mile; coals, corn, potatoes, iron and other metals, fourpence; and all goods not specified, sixpence” (p. 45 of [13]). …

Although some railroads did operate with other companies’ equipment on their rails for decades (and modern ones do so extensively), there was a relatively quick shift in the 1830s and 1840s towards railroads being exclusive carriers. There were technical reasons promot- ing such a shift (safety was jeopardized with multiple operators and primitive technology), but there is evidence that desire for greater control over pricing by railroads was also a major consideration [64]. Once railroads became carriers, they could engage in much more extensive price discrimination than allowed by the toll structure in their charters. And, propelled by the economics of their industry, with high fixed costs, railroads did engage in massive price discrimination, including personal discrimination. The result was massive political movements leading to government regulation [62,65].

Railroads & tolls Read More »

Canals & tolls

business, history, tech in changing society, technology / /

From Andrew Odlyzko’s “Pricing and Architecture of the Internet: Historical Perspectives from Telecommunications and Transportation“:

The modern canal era can be said to start with the Duke of Bridgewater’s Canal in England. Originally it was just a means of connecting the Duke’s colliery to Manchester. The parliamentary charter (which enabled him to take over private property, with appropriate compensation) obliged the Duke to carry cargo to Manchester at a maximum charge of 30 pence a ton, and to sell his own coal in Manchester for no more than 80 pence a ton, about half the price that had prevailed before [38,68]. Parliament was determined to obtain substantial benefits for the public from the grant of government powers to the Duke. …

The great financial success of the Duke of Bridgewater’s Canal led to widespread attempts to emulate it. In the early 1790s, there was a canal mania, with a burst of construction that was never to be replicated in Britain. (The U.S. had its canal mania some decades later, following on the great success of the Erie Canal.) The charters of those canals show a general trend towards greater price discrimination. …

Similar toll schedules depending on cargo were also common in the United States. As an example, when parts of the still incomplete Erie Canal were opened in 1820, there was a long list of tolls, concluding with “All articles not enumerated, one cent, per ton, per mile” (Chapter 2 of [81]). The enumerated articles (among those that were measured by the ton) were charged tolls ranging from salt and gypsum at 0.5 cents per ton per mile, to 1 cent for flour, to 2 cents for merchandise, and nothing for fuel to be used in the manufacture of salt (so that it was necessary not only to know the nature of the cargo, but its ultimate use). …

While canal operators were trying to squeeze carriers (who were trying to squeeze merchants, in ways similar to those described below for turnpikes), carriers often attempted to evade tolls. They bribed toll-collectors, misrepresented what the cargo was, or how much there was of it, and in some cases even hid cargo with high toll charges under commodities such as sand for which the fees were low. The countermeasures, just as they are today, and would likely be in the future with electronic communications, were based on both technology and law. Measurements were taken (in many cases there were books available to canal operators, listing canal boats, and the weight of cargo aboard as a function of how deeply in the water they lay), and there were punitive penalties for evasion.

Canals & tolls Read More »

Big companies & their blind spots

business, history, tech in changing society, technology / /

From Paul Graham’s “Are Software Patents Evil?“:

Fortunately for startups, big companies are extremely good at denial. If you take the trouble to attack them from an oblique angle, they’ll meet you half-way and maneuver to keep you in their blind spot. To sue a startup would mean admitting it was dangerous, and that often means seeing something the big company doesn’t want to see. IBM used to sue its mainframe competitors regularly, but they didn’t bother much about the microcomputer industry because they didn’t want to see the threat it posed. Companies building web based apps are similarly protected from Microsoft, which even now doesn’t want to imagine a world in which Windows is irrelevant. …

Big companies & their blind spots Read More »