Jason Hong's Confabulations

http://www.newscientist.com/article.ns?id=dn6932 My initial reaction is that the designers of this security robot must have watched one too many episodes of The Prisoner .

Interesting argument, main point is that usability is more important to have as a part of the product development culture than to have specialists in it. http://www.boxesandarrows.com/archives/investing_in_usability_testing_versus_training.php Usability professionals offer so much more than just testing. Usability dollars can be spent in other ways; in fact, I argue that usability training is often a far better investment than usability testing.

Just got a really lame phishing attempt from "PayPal". It's actually pretty sophisticated, here is the link with the associated Javascript: <a href=3D"http://site4.apo=%6C%6C%6F%68%6Fsting.com/%6B%61%74%68%79%2D%77%65%62%38%38%2E= %6E%65%74/httpdocs/webscr/" onMouseOver=3D"window.status=3D'https://www.paypal.com';return true;" onMouseOut=3D"window.status=3D' '; return true;">Click here to verify your Information</a> So if you have Javascript turned on for mail, it masks the destination URL with paypal (though for Mozilla, the destination URL is simply not shown... is this a bug?) Anyway, the sad part is that the URL doesn't seem to exist. How weak is that?

http://www.cs.washington.edu/homes/tom/hotrev.pdf Very interesting idea in HotNets03. As an experiment this year, we solicited a leading researcher to write a signed “public review” of each accepted paper. Our intent is to foster a dialogue between authors and readers. Too often, the context for understanding the relevance of a paper emerges only during the Q&A or hallway conversations at the workshop, and then disappears into the ether. The result is that each new reader must start afresh in deconstructing the paper. We encouraged the public reviewers to be opinionated rather than factual, and to consider their canvas the broad set of topics raised by each paper. The opinions expressed in the public reviews are those of the reviewers alone, and intentionally do not reflect the views of the program committee or the chairs. The reviewers were selected independently of the program selection process and thus sometimes came to conclusions quite different from the program committee.

http://www.acm.org/ubiquity/interviews/v6i1czerwinski.html Good overview of work coming out of one of Microsoft Research's HCI groups. And what Microsoft research wanted to understand was how (when larger displays become mainstream and widely affordable and everybody uses them) — how does the design of our software have to change to scale up to these very large displays? That's the essence of the research problem. It's not a hardware issue per se, but none of the designs right now scale to very large displays.

http://www.birkball.com/ Man, I've got a real itching to play it right now, but alas, the closest table I know of is in Berkeley, CA, a few thousand miles away...

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Confidence_trick Truly fascinating reading about con men, I wonder if there are any psychology classes on this? (If you're wondering, I'm looking at user interface issues for helping people avoid these kinds of online cons. Not a bad job I have, eh?)