Alexander Chalkidis

Category: Technology

  • I did the one thing Facebook simply can’t handle

    I did the one thing Facebook simply can’t handle

    And I got murdered (on Facebook) for doing it.

    We all suspect that “deleting” anything on Facebook doesn’t really delete it. Our personal information is way too valuable. So hiding, archiving and any other option doesn’t really cut it. Under pressure from the EU and everyone else, Facebook finally provided a way to delete your activity. Of course they hid it in complicated menus which they keep changing.

    But worse still, it doesn’t even work.

    I know because I regularly delete all my facebook activity. I also regularly delete all my Instagram photos. It used to work, now it doesn’t. I resorted to writing a bot to do it “manually”, ie to go and delete everything one by one from my smartphone as if it was me doing it. Obviously Facebook doesn’t think anyone will have the patience to do it like that.

    And what happened when I went to Twitter to complain about it?

    They suspended my account. With no recourse to recovery according to them. That is how scared they are that more people will follow my example. After all I have always said that it is ludicrous to rely on Facebook or Instagram as a place to keep anything important. Right from the day they started I advocated basing your communications on your website so you can control it all best.

    And own it.

  • Security is a personal choice

    Security is a personal choice

    Just got off chat support with N26.  It is one of those online banks like Revolut or Wise.  Only it isn’t.  Because it has everything annoyingly Germanic about it as humanly possible.  My feedback at the end of my ordeal (to change the phone number I have declared) was “just copy everyone else”.  To which they – predictably – responded that they give great importance to security for the good of everyone, blah blah blah.

    It’s not “everyone” with the account.  Just me.  And I use it for small change.  I don’t care if someone hacks it easier, that is how I have it in my head.  “Not much money=not worth a lot of security”.  Makes sense to me.  Not just for banking, for everything.  If you are heavily invested in Facebook sure, go ahead, have two factor authentication or whatever else you want.  If you don’t care, why bother?

    It isn’t just because I am a liberal who believes in choice.  It makes business sense too.  By all means dream up of extra security.  Make it available.  Advertise it, explain it, heck you can even charge extra for it.  But it makes zero sense for the same high level of security to be compulsory for everyone.  This isn’t a physical bank where one thief getting in will risk everybody’s money.  This is my personal account. I should be able to choose how to verify what. I might like to sign in from new devices easily. I may not want to rely on a phone for SMS verification. My choice!

    I can blame the media.  They love to make a fuss about online hazards.  I can blame security experts, always exaggerating and talking about crazy breaches they have witnessed which most of us will never get close to.  I can blame human nature, some people are security crazy and then try and force it down the neck of the rest of us.  And when something goes wrong with security everyone jumps to conclusions and takes the opportunity to increase it with more security.

    Enough is enough though.

  • The biggest failure of global business

    The biggest failure of global business

    A trillion market cap is pretty impressive for a company that mainly sells to Americans. It’s not just the 8.5% global market share for computers that is pathetic. Nor the equally laughable share of global smartphones. Android is the defacto global standard, iOS is a joke. Yet for people living in Callifornia or New York (and them alone) it is important. And they are the people writing in tech magazines and blogs, they are the people in the media. They are the ones keeping the stock price so high for absolutely no reason.

    It takes a lot to make a truly global company. Google develops its products in local languages, it makes tools we all rely on. Really rely on, not fancy toys. Things you can’t live without anymore. HP has local support. You know real support, real sales people, real local offices in every country in the world. Apple? Not even close! And they have never seemed to care. Too big to fail, too close to an all American symbol.

    This does in fact present a real problem to users. With such a small loyal user base Apple doesn’t need to care about backwards compatibility, to take just one example. Unlike Windows or Android, they can just leave old users in the dust and demand you upgrade. It is amazing that I can still use a computer with Windows 95 for a lot of things (even running DOS applications!) or and old Android 4 phone. It will connect and work for most things unlike Apple devices. This is the real world of real responsibility. When major corporations, governments and institutions around the world rely on you, that is what you do, you care about connections and standards. You talk to other companies, you collaborate, you commit.

    Not Apple. Despite popular perceptions, Apple doesn’t actually innovate. At all. They are great at marketing. Design maybe. Innovation? Not really. Not at all. If we talk purely tech they have nothing. The very public and obvious failures of their Maps app or Siri or anything that demands you to – well – actually work seriously on something, they simply can’t do it.

    It’s a one horse pony. For a single market. And it’s time we all started treating it as such.

    Clever street promo in Berlin which pops up at night. You know normal marketing from companies that sell computers that actually do the work the world runs on

  • Apple would have never made a vaccine even if it could

    Apple would have never made a vaccine even if it could

    Look at the market share. Globally Android has 73% of the mobile operating market and iOS 26%. But in Africa it is more like 83% vs 14%. Only in North America is Apple ahead. And this has repercussions which I am amazed the rest of the world puts up with.

    Unlike Google that tries to build products for humans all over the world, Apple is simply catering to its locals. It’s not just the languages it doesn’t bother including. It’s entire distribution and support is focused on the US, UK, France and a few other countries. That’s it. Apple has always acted – and still acts – as if it is a little Callifornian company that made it big. In America. And it doesn’t care about anyone else. The rest of the world can adapt to the products.

    Is it working? Sure. The profits speak for themselves. Is it good for customers? Only if you are American. Here in Greece where I live, if you have a Mac computer you are the proud third minority after Windows (84%) and Linux (9%) as Apple only has 3% market share. Good luck getting any sort of support for your product, most Mac owners struggle to find a friend that knows what they can do about any issue. And they end up paying through the nose for good tech to help them out.

    Globally OS X commands just 15% market share, even in the United States all those iPhone users aren’t buying as they total just 28% compared to 62% Windows users and even Chromebooks are making an attack and becoming popular. Yet somehow Apple isn’t irrelevant. Is it through innovation? Heck no! I would disregard their recent relative success with their own chipsets, it is a short lived fluke much like all those years when they were going to “burn Pentiums to the ground”. M1 is a party trick that fools only Apple die hards. No IT manager is falling for it because we all know Apple never sticks to anything long term. It is a marketing company, not a tech pioneer.

    Is it important? I would say that it is a problem we need to take care of. It skews the market in a big way. A bad way. There are plenty exciting technologies that get shelved behind all the media focus on Apple adding a new button to its iPhone or something equally stupid as that in Apple’s constant efforts to copy Android whilst making it look like it thought of something up on its own.

    So is Google better? Hell yeah! While Apple spends ages dreaming up of new ways to get their phones to use a different dongle that costs 80 dollars for no good reason, Google is out there making products for the entire planet. Saving lost languages. Making useful products we all use everyday like Search, Maps, YouTube and so many more applications of its advanced Artificial Intelligence that actually helps the planet. They are giving away protein databases to scientists and the infrastructure on which so much of the modern world progresses on.

    Google is global, Apple is American.

    And there is nothing wrong with being American. As long as they don’t try and sell their extremely limited in purpose and use case products to the rest of the world. In fact the way Apple refuses to follow international standards and constantly blackmails developers into their walled garden is costing the world economy every day. We live in a globalized world. Amazing collaboration such as what we witnessed recently with the COVID-19 pandemic can only be achieved though open standards and transparency.

    If Apple was into pharmaceutical vaccine and developed a vaccine, it would be ten times the price of competitors, incompatible with anything else, they would not reveal their research results and would expect everyone to pay every year for an update. So why are you letting them control the devices you use every day?

  • The case for a pyjama phone

    The case for a pyjama phone

    Maybe you will call it something else in the future. But I know you need it. I have used a pyjama phone from the first time I swapped up my mobile phone. That previous model seemed fine up until yesterday, it did the same stuff more or less, maybe a bit slower.

    1. Are you worried about your battery? You haven’t decided if it should stay on the charger all night or not, maybe you want it to stop at 80% charge, whatever you like. Get home, switch off your main phone and plug it in to exactly the level you think best. In the meantime….
    2. …relax. Your pyjama phone has only the apps you need at home. Only what you choose to use, the rest can wait. It has to wait, you haven’t even installed it. Instant recallibration.
    3. Take a load of your main phone. A whole lot of apps are only useful when you are home. Why carry them around all day and weigh down your main phone (and your brain) with them? Numerous chat apps or social media I only have on my pyjama phone. If you message me on Viber I won’t see it until I get home. TikTok is not something I need to be seeing all day.
    4. Test and play with stuff you aren’t sure about. That app you read about (on your pyjama phone at night, on that news app you wouldn’t install on your main phone) and are curious? Just try it out.

    There are a lot of uses for a pyjama phone. But the main objective is to create a “safe place”, a calm place, you are not going to switch off all phones completely like they say you should, so at least have a phone which is automatically set up to be closer to whatever you want to feel like doing at home.

  • You are all wrong about Google. 2-5 years wrong.

    You are all wrong about Google. 2-5 years wrong.

    It is fascinating to watch the media, analysts or financial whiz kids try to explain how and why Google does anything. How they enjoy the “failures” or run through the “threats” to the company. “Google just can’t seem to get it together in messaging apps” writes one guru. “Privacy issues could damage its advertising revenue” another. “Pixel phones never got market share” proclaims a title.

    How little they know.

    The only way to explain how Google does business is to imagine you are a two year old child. And Google is the adult. Not even any adult, a really smart and fit adult. Say you are playing catching and throwing a ball. You can hardly manage it, the ball falls out of your hands, you fall over trying to run to it. And Google will pretend to be at the same level of incompetence as you are for a while just to keep you happy.

    We get glimpses of this at times. But Google is a pretty smart adult and doesn’t rush into giving things away. When pressed by the stockmarket or developments it releases something that wows us. Or something to distract attention. Take Apple’s privacy war for example. First move was the Pixel 3a. Easy. Destroy Apple’s margin by bringing the whole smartphone market to a much lower average price point. But Apple insisted. No problem. Google doesn’t need old fashioned methods of tracking users. Just burn the whole thing. Google has tools to track which are far more advanced. Much like the stupid European GDPR fuss, Google will always come out on top. It now announced it is reducing its cut of Play Store app and digital goods sales from 30% to 15% for the first $1 million of revenue a creator earns each year. Big deal! That will be around 600 million of just 1.6 billion in revenue a year. Drop in the pond. Whatever keeps the kids happy.

    Because it is only pretending to be dumb when playing catch with you.

    I reckon Google is 2-5 years ahead of most of its competitors in most important fields of whatever it does. And even if it isn’t, it can make up for it with other tools or knowledge to the same end. It is just carefully cherry picking so that we don’t all figure it out. Elon Musk is a brash three year old in comparison. He makes a big fuss about buying into cryptocurrencies. Google founders made moves in the same field long ago quietly. Because with the amount of data and the AI they have, they know things a long long time before anyone else.

    So when online booking for hotels was announced recently, free for all, and retail shopping….soon free for the whole planet, well you see where it is going. Google decides when and how to release tools that can totally dominate. Don’t mess with the adult or they will get out the adult tools.

    Feel free to drop the ball now.

  • Big Tech saves lives – 911 calls need to change

    Big Tech saves lives – 911 calls need to change

    If and when you are psychologically up to it, listen to some 911 calls. It is not just good indirect experience in case you are ever in a desperate situation but also heart warming to know that so many ordinary people can turn into super heroes when the need arises.

    It is also absolutely infuriating.

    As a person that always looks for the optimal solution to problems, I often find myself wanting to scream at either the caller or the operator. 911 (or 112 if you are in Europe, or other numbers in other countries) is an amazing feat of collaboration and government actually managing to do something useful which generally works well. The history of getting different carriers to maintain an emergency service is fascinating.

    But it is far from enough.

    In the recent pandemic we initially all discussed contact tracing. Apple and Google silently yet amazingly, produced a way to use our smart phones. They got little credit for it mainly because they are so afraid of the privacy backlash. But maybe emergency calls is a way for us all to reap the benefits of this work in the long term.

    Have you ever dialed in an emergency? Here’s what happens. Regardless of whether or not you have paid your bill, or even if you are near a cell tower of the company you buy service from, your route gets patched through to a central service. (In the U.S. it is a bit more complicated due to different State laws and histories with telcos.) Your phone sends your location to the person picking up your call to save everyone time.

    So why just location? Your phone battery levels might be useful for emergency services to know. But what would be really great would be access to your cameras. Oh, you are worried they might abuse it? Well listen to the lady that drowned in her car because 911 didn’t believe it was filling up with water. In fact why stop at your cameras, based on location in case of emergency, 911 should be able to ask bystanders’ smartphone cameras to switch on. You get an emergency notification and accept if you want. It would help in a lot of situations. All available data from smart phone sensors of the person calling 911 as well as people nearby could save a lot of lives and energy.

    One of the biggest problems with 911 calls is pranksters. Again, there are tech solutions. Because if the call also send a log of recent activity, emergency services could much more quickly and reliably assess if you are serious or a ten year old playing a bad joke. It could be with your approval, a message on your phone saying “we need to access your internet history and app usage to make sure your emergency call is valid”. If my kid was in danger or my car is half fallen down a cliff I am pretty sure I won’t mind them seeing whatever else I did today to prove I am serious.

    In the early days of the internet, I had suggested public use of banners on websites for announcements that are important to society. It would a kind of online ad tax to help find missing children or spread awareness for important topics which don’t get enough funding for communication. Maybe 911 calls can start something which brings back the concept of public dogoodery in a new way again.

  • No serious user (let alone a company) should trust Apple silicon, here’s why

    No serious user (let alone a company) should trust Apple silicon, here’s why

    Let me explain how the tech world works for Intel.  It isn’t that they made “a wrong decision” or “were late embracing new materials” or whatever journalists wrote recently under the influence of the Apple marketing machine.  Sure, we all would have loved a David and Goliath story, or something truly exciting and revolutionary in the processor world.

    But it doesn’t work like that.

    The tech world has suffered too much from “move fast and break things”.  Apple’s M1 chip is a typical example of just that.  They botched a way to make it sort of work well enough on some applications.  Including Intel memory ordering or dedicating cache to Javascript however won’t cut it when you are making a serious buying decision.  It hardly makes it for a private user if you think about it.  I outlaid some of my objections here in a way that anyone that has seen Apple operate before should understand and believe.

    There is a reason the planet does not run on Apple machines.  And it was never about price.  Apple simply hasn’t got the people, resources or will power to collaborate on the global scale that Intel does.  Most people don’t even see this work.  While Apple toys with its users by changing power adaptors or connectors, Intel has people on committees making sure that the new USB will work on 90 percent of the planet’s computers.  Not work “sometimes”, not “work pretty well”, it has to work exactly as expected every time.  Apple can shoot off variations of Bluetooth of its own.  Their iPhone users will put up with it.  Intel can’t and won’t.  From space exploration to bank infrastructure, our planet relies on technological solutions that  have been developed through long term collaboration.  And that is never, ever from Apple.

    Serious tech companies work with other serious tech companies to ensure that everything works.  I remember putting my ten year old IBM laptop next to a fully loaded Mac G4, both had been bought around the same time.  My PC ran everything perfectly, even MS DOS software written decades ago.  The Mac was practically useless.  Microsoft and Intel are boring.  Yeah, sure.  If you consider reliably working boring.  They don’t just announce that 64bit is the future and throw a switch.  They find ways to communicate with tens of thousands of other companies.  Through trade shows, committees, working groups and a million other ways.  There are many candidate technologies.  Most fail.  Somehow we need  to make sure that the ones that really fit best are the ones that are supported.  Yes of course, that delays implementation.  And so it should.

    Sure, if you have a very small investment recoup window and a very specific task in hand that justifies an M1 laptop, go ahead.  If only you depend on the acquisition, play with it all you like.  But if you need to bet your life, company or future on the silicon you are about to buy, Apple is definitely not the company to trust.

    Apple was, is and will remain a fringe player.  Don’t be fooled by the hype.  They may make loads of money but it is from their lifestyle products, not their RnD.   We all know the ARM moves were through acquisition, nothing internal. Apple doesn’t innovate technologically but in marketing.  They bought a chip company and used them for this gimmick now like they have done with many other companies over the years.  Look again at the numbers.  Whether it is iOS or personal computing, they never get a big piece of the pie.  They don’t want to.  They can’t handle it.  The company recently paid a fine for batterygate and laughed at the amount it came to in total.  But that is only because their user base is so small.  90percent of the planet doesn’t care, we don’t use Apple devices and never will.

  • What nobody is telling you about the new Macs

    What nobody is telling you about the new Macs

    The entire industry has gone crazy about the “phenomenal” performance of the new Apple computers. As I predicted, under Tim Cook Apple is indeed changing. But not nearly enough. And don’t be fooled like all those tech “experts” who make money from click baiting you with the impressive titles about “PC killing performance”. When Cook first took over I famously wrote that I might buy an iPhone in a couple of future iterations. I stand corrected. Tim Cook disappointed me, he didn’t turn it into the best version of IBM. This is a company with no mission statement that simply doesn’t have any technological innovation of its own. Apple is not about technology, it is more of an American stock market game that moves the i-Goalposts as much as is needed to fool enough of the people.

    So before you rush out to buy one of these new laptops everyone is raving about, let me tell you why you will regret it. Let’s look at a two year scenario. What could go wrong with this lovely new Apple laptop in the next two years?

    1. If anything isn’t working, well, you’re on your own. Apple users have been crying over faulty keyboards forever and the company didn’t even acknowledge them, let alone fix it for them. The “you are holding it wrong” mentality is still strong at Apple.
    2. Accessories – they have you by the balls! Even when Apple pretends to follow a standard, they twist it into something proprietary. Whether it is power, Bluetooth, storage, or even simple cables, they always find a way to make you pay more and restrict your choices. Apple can make even buying a webcam a difficult task while the rest of the planet simply plugs and plays.
    3. We know that the gimmicks might disappear. They put that bar on the top of the keyboard, made you pay extra for it, you showed it off to your friends the first day, and then what? Other companies will at least make an effort to support it a few years into the future, Apple takes pride in not giving a damn about you and how much you loved or hated something on their machines.
    4. We burn Pentiums to the ground. We have seen this exact scenario before. Apple had moved to IBM made processors. For a very short period they had a bit of an edge in performance. It wasn’t like for like if you also considered price, but it was close. Almost immediately however Pentiums took over. As the benchmark test showed Apple falling much behind even on Photoshop and other staples of the designer world Apple simply disregarded them. After years of pretending they finally switched to Intel. 95% of the planet works on PCS. That is where science develops everything, that is where serious businesses invest. It is simply a matter of time for the serious users to overtake any minor party trick Apple comes up with.
    5. It has got a bit easier to go IN their walled garden but remains almost impossible to get OUT of the Apple ecosystem. They are making money from services now, trying to reduce their dependency on iPhones. So YOU are the product. Buy those much cheaper Apple speakers, wow, they are a third of the original price, why? Because much like Amazon they just want to get you into their world of services. (I can export everything from twenty years of living with Google with one click and take them to any other IT system as they are openly accessible formats.)
    6. Apple has no friends. I watched the company enter the video business. They never innovated, simply bought other companies, used them to gain market share. They made a big fuss about entering the broadcast business, then suddenly gave up and left everyone high and dry with no support. Even Final Cut Pro languished unloved and unsupported. They don’t share with partners, they don’t invest in retail channels. That is how Apple rolls. It never includes your best interests.

    Indeed Apple has written the book on “how to do something that really screws your customers and get away with it”. They stop supporting something you love all of a sudden with no explanation. It might be that they make no new drivers for your printer, it might be that they stop working completely with a peripheral company you had already bought everything from. When they switched to 64bit machines, yes, we all knew that sooner or later the industry was heading that way. But only a selfish idiot would force that on us. Even now millions of people rely on 32bit solutions thanks to the incredible backwards compatibility of Windows. When Steve Jobs announced he was killing Flash he was no prophet; he was a disgustingly selfish businessman trying to bully the planet through marketing gloss. I hate Flash as much as anyone, probably more, but it is still around for good reason and it outlasted Jobs. Acting selfishly is part of their charm according to their fans.

    Well, if you like that sort of thing and have plenty time and money to waste, run along and buy a new MacBook. I warned you.

  • Enemy at the gates: content marketing vs natural language (vs litigation)

    Enemy at the gates: content marketing vs natural language (vs litigation)

    I couldn’t help it. The English in the post was so bad I had to state the case. Sure, it only had one “like” and probably almost nobody had seen it, but all the same, it cried out “auto-translate”. The sentence structure was not blatantly incorrect, just…off. Sure, there were several actual mistakes, but they were the sort of thing that you would find in a Google search.

    But in a different context.

    This particular post was promoting a content marketing seminar or something like that. Some self-professed expert selling expertise. It was full of hashtags and the actual words were possibly spurted out by some paid service of other experts. The Facebook page had several thousand “likes” but the actual post just one which is fairly typical of this level of wannabees. But it is indicative of a larger problem.

    While we discuss politics and how, when, if and what the platforms should censor or not in public dialogue, this is what is happening in the background. If they make their algorithms so they favor tags, well, tags is what users will give them. Even Apple has started using tags on their YouTube channel. They won’t get high in search ranking without them. Plain and simple.

    So the post with terrible English attracted the attention of the owner of the page. He initially said it was correct, then said it might have been a typo. He then set his lawyer on me with threats to delete it. In a way this behaviour is entirely consistent with all the other things he has copied and pasted in order to present himself as an expert. That is how it works. A pecking order of ignorance. In the fast-changing world of social media, you can be an expert as long as you find customers with less knowledge or desire to keep up with the latest trends. Threatening to sue is standard operating procedure and we are all the poorer for it.

    For what is the value of social media if I can’t freely post on my wall and discuss with my friends without fear of litigation? Should we all end up using it simply as content marketing, ever promoting something and seeing it simply as yet another channel? Social networks should actively protect our right to write freely and without fear or the content will simply become pointless. Even public figures should have the right to discuss freely on social media with their friends.

    As well as all other problems, the actual language will end up being computer code compatible with whatever indexing mechanisms they use. Humans like to communicate. Stop policing it and enjoy.

    Oh well, at least he corrected his post the next day. ; )

    FOR THE RECORD: Ι flagged the comment where I was threatened with litigation to Linkedin but have not received an answer.