uh....skype maybe. Just because MS got a hold of it means its down the tubes just yet.
Read the headline again. Skype has never been Free Software and has always used a secret, proprietary protocol which may be leaking all kinds of private information.
I remember reading something similar with sip over encrypted channel... I guess it is the plague of all compressed communication even if encrypted... the only way to bypass that is use an uncompressed protocol and not blank out the silence. I guess what's new is they've done it with skype.
It's only a problem for variable bitrate compression algorithms, not less efficient fixed bitrate ones like the venerable G.722. It may only be a problem for voice-specific variable bitrate codecs, not general ones like MP3 or Vorbis. This risk from this type of attack may also be greatly mitigated by decoupling datagram size and timing from the output of the encoder, which would probably increase latency but still allow use of efficient codecs.
Of course, since the data basically represents sound waves, there is a certain level of predictability and pattern on the data unlike normal data which is much more random.
It would have to be a special encryption to get rid of this pattern using a more dynamic algorithm that changes as it progress (which can make it annoying to decrypt or simpler to detect) or disjoint the data over a greater amount of data (making it somewhat harder to find the patterns though still might be possible) of the encryption though that is difficult in a time sensitive app like Skype which encrypts and sends as it receives the data.
It does not follow that encrypting sound waveforms leaks information just because they are predictable. If that were the case, encryption wouldn't be very useful in general. There is no such thing as "normal data" and most data people need to encrypt does have strong patterns. The entire purpose of encryption is to make non-random data look random.
The method for guessing what people are saying described in TFA exploits specific properties of the most efficient voice compression algorithms coupled with timing and size information that can be gleaned from capturing all datagrams. This method could be easily rendered useless by using a less efficient compression algorithm which uses a fixed bit rate or by simply adding padding to datagrams to hide the true size of the encoded audio frames.
There's no need to route around damage that hasn't happened yet. The solution is to make sure this bill does not become a law. It hasn't passed either chamber of Congress yet.
You're missing the fact that your laptop, server, or ISP can remember the DNS resolver addresses.
But if I forget the DNS resolver addresses, and I'm on a system that has never remembered the addresses in the first place, how do I look them up without already having working DNS? At least under IPv4, it's easier to remember the IPv4 addresses of Google Public DNS or OpenDNS in my head than to remember to carry a USB flash drive containing a text file of the addresses. And it's a lot cheaper to remember the IPv4 addresses in my head than to subscribe to smartphone service, which according to Sprint and T-Mobile costs $65 per month more than my current cell phone service through Virgin Mobile USA.
You might assume that I am unlikely to run into a system that has never remembered the addresses in the first place. But I often troubleshoot problems with Internet access for family members, and many of these problems come from problems with the DNS server whose IPv4 address the ISP has provided through DHCP. For example, not only does Comcast hijack NXDOMAIN responses to its own "Comcast Domain Helper service" advertising pages, but in a lot of cases, Comcast's DNS servers intermittently forget that a subscriber's account is still subscribed and acts as a captive portal to the "self-install" setup page where the user can download a Windows executable file to configure the modem for a first-time installation. Hardcoding Google Public DNS solves this problem every time.
There's something very wrong if you have to type public DNS server addresses often enough that memorization is a big help. However, even in that case, I don't think IPv6 is necessarily more burdensome. For example, compare OpenDNS's IPv4 vs. IPv6 addresses. Is it harder to remember "2620:0:ccc::2" than "208.67.220.220"? I think I'd actually prefer the former since it has letters as well as numbers.
Another subtlety that I'd forgotten is that nothing in the DNS protocol prevents queries over IPv4 from being answered with AAAA IPv6 records or queries over IPv6 from being answered with IPv4 A records. Google Public DNS explicitly supports queries for AAAA records even though the service itself is only available via IPv4. The addresses you've already memorized (8.8.8.8 and 8.8.4.4) will work fine for looking up IPv6 addresses.
The whole point of DNS is that you set it up and then you don't have to remember addresses.
But in order to set up DNS, as I understand it, one still has to memorize the addresses of two recursive DNS resolvers, or if you run your own recursive resolver, the root servers. For example, Google Public DNS is two recursive DNS resolvers at static IPv4 addresses 8.8.4.4 and 8.8.8.8. Or what am I missing?
You're missing the fact that your laptop, server, or ISP can remember the DNS resolver addresses. You don't have to keep them in your head. I've never memorized IPv4 addresses of DNS resolvers, whether I just use the ones my ISP gives me or I configure my router box to use OpenDNS. I look them up once, set it in my system and then forget them.
Do you surf web sites by typing in their IPv4 addresses now?
No, but I remember the IPv4 addresses of Google Public DNS servers.
Kudos on your sharp memory, but I question the general usefulness of memorizing DNS server IP addresses. The whole point of DNS is that you set it up and then you don't have to remember addresses.
> We need to move away from typing addresses manually and toward things like multicast DNS anyway.
Why?
(I'm asking seriously, not to sound like a dick or anything.)
I (and I assume most humans) find it easier to remember names than numbers. That's why I use DNS or mDNS as much as possible even on small home networks. Since IPv4 addresses on such networks are always private, I can't rely on them staying the same forever if I have to restructure my network.
No. Because those are handled by DNS-servers now. If you expect us not to bother with IPs in an age where every single device on the face of the Earth has its unique, globally routable address, you're going to have to give us a DNS that handles them all.
IPv6-accessible sites need AAAA records just as IPv4-accessible sites need A records. You don't need AAAA records for every IPv6 node any more than you need an A record for every IPv4 node.
Even if I want to FTP to the PC in the other room from my laptop, I'd have to type the full v6 address (back to square minus one), a shorter NAT-ted-mangled address of some sort (back to square one), or a device name. As the addresses are globally routed, there needs to be a global DNS record for that PC and my laptop, otherwise we're back to addresses...
Clearly, you've never heard of Multicast DNS which is convenient for IPv4 networks as well as IPv6 ones. If you must use an IPv6 address to access a device on your local network, you can also use a link-local address which is at least as easy to remember as an IPv4 one.
Riiight, so when can we expect you bringing online the DNS-server that provides AAAAA-records for every single device on the planet so we don't have to deal with IP-addresses any more?
Do you surf web sites by typing in their IPv4 addresses now?
I have IPv6 through my ISP, Sonic.net. Whenever I use BitTorrent, I see plenty of IPv6 hosts. The reason is pretty obvious to me: if you're passing IPv6 through your home router, you have an externally-reachable IPv6 address... but you may not have an externally-reachable IPv4 address thanks to your home router's NAT.
Presumably, this means that one incentive for home users getting IPv6 is to get a better-connected BitTorrent network. BitTorrent is pretty popular, but ISPs are never going to tell you "Get IPv6 so you can download movies... er, I mean, Ubuntu Live CDs!... faster."
Although Bittorrent is one of the peer to peer protocols that benefits from getting rid of NAT, I think a bigger case can be made for VoIP ones like SIP and XMPP Jingle (Google Talk). The tricks people have had to resort to make them work through NATs are horrific and don't always work. I expect Skype has to do similar things, but it's all secret.
Yeah, it lets you get rid of NAT (which was never really much of a problem).
But:
You've obviously never tried using a peer-to-peer protocol such as SIP or Bittorrent from behind a NAT. NAT has been a problem since it was invented and if we don't switch to IPv6 will continue to become worse as more layers of it are added.
Until then, it's like someone 40 years ago with a video phone showing "how cool" it is. Fabulous. But not much point until everyone else gets them too.
Video calling is poor metaphor for IPv6, which is an infrastructure upgrade rather than a new feature or application on an existing network. Again, you're missing the point that we must switch to IPv6 or experience increasingly difficult network configurations. Phone companies don't force many customers onto a party line or require them to call through multiple operators when numbers run out. They add digits or area codes. That's what IPv6 does for the Internet.
I can agree with this part. Practically the sole reason I'm fearing the change is that I'll no longer be able to set up devices and connections easily. As it stands right now, I take one look at an IPv6 address, and it's enough to make me blanch and think "Holy hellbore, how am I going to remember that monstrosity of an address??".
That's the kind of thinking you and everyone else needs to unlearn. IP addresses aren't supposed to be memorized, especially not IPv6 ones. The fact that we deal with IPv4 addresses so much is evidence of limitations of our current system based on scarcity of addresses.
Plus, ipv4 is easy to manage; your average network engineer has IPs memorized for when things break, or at least a somewhat logical addressing scheme so it's super-easy to guess the IP of a specific component when DNS breaks or is inaccessible, to be able to log into the device and fix it. the dot-quads make things really easy, four integers with a max of three digits (people memorize numbers and spelling most easily when broken down into chunks of three or less) per integer. It's going to require a lot of training, documenting, and large financial cost. It should have been done up front in 1998-1999 when the ipv6 spec was largely finalized, prototyped and tested, before broadband became truly mainstream. It would have been much cheaper to do the work as much of the Internet infrastructure was still being built, but it wasn't deemed profitable then because even right up to the dot-com bubble business analysts still insisted the Internet was just a fad. Now it's quite necessary, but ISPs don't want to do it because the expense could be immense.
There are reasons the cutover hasn't even been attempted yet. It's going to be costly in many ways.
IPv6 will be easier to manage when used properly, since manual address allocation and complex port forwarding rules won't be needed any more. We need to move away from typing addresses manually and toward things like multicast DNS anyway. There certainly will be a lot of training required since the old ways are so entrenched. The cost of the transition will only increase and ISPs that delay it are just digging their pits deeper. Since most corporations only seem to look at short term costs and benefits, I expect we'll see some pretty deep pits.
It really is weird having every machine in the house with a unique, globally addressable IP again after all these years behind a single public address using NAT. No more port forwarding.
You mean the Internet as designed isn't a pain to use? Who'd a thunk it?
I also haven't set up tunneling because it doesn't seem worth it right now. I place the blame for low IPv6 adoption squarely on the ISPs for not providing IPv6 addresses to all their customers. Doing that wouldn't interfere with current IPv4 configuration and in most situations would just work without any special configuration by customers. Perhaps one reason they're moving so slowly is they don't want to spend the money necessary to provide routers with decent IPv6 implementations. If I were really cynical, I'd say it's because the increasing scarcity of IPv4 addresses lets them charge a premium.
The interfaces should adapt to us, not the other way around.
So what's an example of a user interface that successfully adapts to the user? I submit the car as one of the must successful user interfaces ever. Do cars adapt to users or the other way around? I had to learn how to turn the steering wheel smoothly, apply throttle and brake and clutch smoothly.
Another example is the standard phone interface. For many decades, it was a dial. Gradually, that was replaced with the 3x3 dialpad which is still displayed on my Android phone. Neither adapts to the user, but the dialpad is still used on smartphones because that's what people are used to. Of course, I can also search my contacts textually or by voice, those are not standard interfaces, so there always has to be the dialpad to fall back on.
Once someone sees that the plus sign adds an alarm, then they'll know the plus sign adds an alarm. You only have to figure it out once.
I'm not elderly, but I'm old-ish (63) and I watch people my age struggle with very simple things because rather than learn the underlying concepts, they learn by rote. They learn "the second icon from the left does this". They don't bother to learn what the computer is really doing. Use words like "filesystem" and their eye glaze over. But without basic understanding of the technology, everything on the screen is going to be "magic" - if you don't understand the whys and wherefores, there is no hope of ever accomplishing anything but rote memorization.
I'd say about 90% of the time, they are perfectly well able to understand what's happening if they want - they just don't want to. You can't fix "don't want to learn". The ones who value learning, who don't have a culture of shutting of their brains and refusing to ever think, do just fine.
Of course this doesn't apply once certain disabilities like Alzheimer's enter the picture - that's a different problem and one no UI is going to fix.
I couldn't agree more. Metaphors only go so far. At some point, understanding of what's really going on is necessary. I've tried to help my grandfather (who is now in his 80s) use such things as VCRs and email several times and the main obstacle for him is impatience. He won't spend the time necessary to learn something totally different from what he's used to. AFAIK, he's still printing out each email he receives and deleting them from the inbox because he can't manage folders and searching old messages.
If the problem is that the 82-year-old gentlemen has a narrow field of view, perhaps you should haven't gotten a 27" monitor. You can make the text as big as you want on any size screen.
This reminds me of how so many people supposedly couldn't program their VCRs many years ago. My grandfather claimed he couldn't even though he had a VCR with on-screen programming, which was much easier to use than just the front display. However, I think his problem is mainly impatience. He never takes the time to learn a technology he isn't already familiar with. I've also tried to help him use his email better several times, but he always struggled with basic things like managing folders. AFAIK, he still prints every email he gets, deletes it immediately puts the printout in a drawer or file somewhere.
I'm sure the average iPhone app is far easier to use than the typical VCR from 20 years ago, but that doesn't mean everyone will be able to use it without experimentation or training. Despite claims to the contrary, there is no such thing as an intuitive interface. Obviously, an interface that's similar to something one has used before will be easier to get used to than a totally alien one, but it's impossible to design an interface that is equally familiar to everyone. If someone can't figure out how to use an iPhone app, I tend to think they should either get some training or go back to a "dumb" phone.
However their positives vastly outweigh their negatives. Otherwise they wouldn't be successful.
You're so right. I can't believe I didn't see it before. I'm dumping my installation of Ubuntu and getting a shiny new copy of Windows 7 immediately. I thought Thunderbird was pretty nice, but Outlook is much more popular, so it must be better. It's going to be expensive, but following the simple principle that if something's successful, it must be good will vastly simplify my life.
There are at least as many excellent reasons to like all of the examples, as well. Particularly for non-geek people who don't get caught up in silly software ethics arguments or meaningless technological purity battles.
I concede, sir. You have convinced me that ethics are an outdated, useless concept. If Steve says he knows what users need and Mark says there's no need for privacy any more, who are we to argue?
Slashdot Mirror
uh....skype maybe. Just because MS got a hold of it means its down the tubes just yet.
Read the headline again. Skype has never been Free Software and has always used a secret, proprietary protocol which may be leaking all kinds of private information.
Chase away the Free Software and this is what you get. The gratis software becomes much less reputable even if it is inside someone's walled garden.
The entire "ecosystem" becomes remarkably more crass and predatory.
What are you talking about? It's Apple and Microsoft that chase away Free software, not Google.
...though not publicly, about the chaos in Android's ecosystem. Seems that everything he predicted is coming to pass.
Folks, we need sanity on Android. Currently, it's nowhere to be seen. Who can deny that?
Yeah, freedom == chaos. Oh, Steve, preserve us from the chaos of having to exercise judgment!
Rather than complaining about Slashdot URL-decoding characters, you could just provide a proper hyperlink. BTW, the text of the link doesn't require any special treatment.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wayland_%28display_server_protocol%29
I remember reading something similar with sip over encrypted channel... I guess it is the plague of all compressed communication even if encrypted... the only way to bypass that is use an uncompressed protocol and not blank out the silence. I guess what's new is they've done it with skype.
It's only a problem for variable bitrate compression algorithms, not less efficient fixed bitrate ones like the venerable G.722. It may only be a problem for voice-specific variable bitrate codecs, not general ones like MP3 or Vorbis. This risk from this type of attack may also be greatly mitigated by decoupling datagram size and timing from the output of the encoder, which would probably increase latency but still allow use of efficient codecs.
Of course, since the data basically represents sound waves, there is a certain level of predictability and pattern on the data unlike normal data which is much more random.
It would have to be a special encryption to get rid of this pattern using a more dynamic algorithm that changes as it progress (which can make it annoying to decrypt or simpler to detect) or disjoint the data over a greater amount of data (making it somewhat harder to find the patterns though still might be possible) of the encryption though that is difficult in a time sensitive app like Skype which encrypts and sends as it receives the data.
It does not follow that encrypting sound waveforms leaks information just because they are predictable. If that were the case, encryption wouldn't be very useful in general. There is no such thing as "normal data" and most data people need to encrypt does have strong patterns. The entire purpose of encryption is to make non-random data look random.
The method for guessing what people are saying described in TFA exploits specific properties of the most efficient voice compression algorithms coupled with timing and size information that can be gleaned from capturing all datagrams. This method could be easily rendered useless by using a less efficient compression algorithm which uses a fixed bit rate or by simply adding padding to datagrams to hide the true size of the encoded audio frames.
There's no need to route around damage that hasn't happened yet. The solution is to make sure this bill does not become a law. It hasn't passed either chamber of Congress yet.
You're missing the fact that your laptop, server, or ISP can remember the DNS resolver addresses.
But if I forget the DNS resolver addresses, and I'm on a system that has never remembered the addresses in the first place, how do I look them up without already having working DNS? At least under IPv4, it's easier to remember the IPv4 addresses of Google Public DNS or OpenDNS in my head than to remember to carry a USB flash drive containing a text file of the addresses. And it's a lot cheaper to remember the IPv4 addresses in my head than to subscribe to smartphone service, which according to Sprint and T-Mobile costs $65 per month more than my current cell phone service through Virgin Mobile USA.
You might assume that I am unlikely to run into a system that has never remembered the addresses in the first place. But I often troubleshoot problems with Internet access for family members, and many of these problems come from problems with the DNS server whose IPv4 address the ISP has provided through DHCP. For example, not only does Comcast hijack NXDOMAIN responses to its own "Comcast Domain Helper service" advertising pages, but in a lot of cases, Comcast's DNS servers intermittently forget that a subscriber's account is still subscribed and acts as a captive portal to the "self-install" setup page where the user can download a Windows executable file to configure the modem for a first-time installation. Hardcoding Google Public DNS solves this problem every time.
There's something very wrong if you have to type public DNS server addresses often enough that memorization is a big help. However, even in that case, I don't think IPv6 is necessarily more burdensome. For example, compare OpenDNS's IPv4 vs. IPv6 addresses. Is it harder to remember "2620:0:ccc::2" than "208.67.220.220"? I think I'd actually prefer the former since it has letters as well as numbers.
Another subtlety that I'd forgotten is that nothing in the DNS protocol prevents queries over IPv4 from being answered with AAAA IPv6 records or queries over IPv6 from being answered with IPv4 A records. Google Public DNS explicitly supports queries for AAAA records even though the service itself is only available via IPv4. The addresses you've already memorized (8.8.8.8 and 8.8.4.4) will work fine for looking up IPv6 addresses.
The whole point of DNS is that you set it up and then you don't have to remember addresses.
But in order to set up DNS, as I understand it, one still has to memorize the addresses of two recursive DNS resolvers, or if you run your own recursive resolver, the root servers. For example, Google Public DNS is two recursive DNS resolvers at static IPv4 addresses 8.8.4.4 and 8.8.8.8. Or what am I missing?
You're missing the fact that your laptop, server, or ISP can remember the DNS resolver addresses. You don't have to keep them in your head. I've never memorized IPv4 addresses of DNS resolvers, whether I just use the ones my ISP gives me or I configure my router box to use OpenDNS. I look them up once, set it in my system and then forget them.
Do you surf web sites by typing in their IPv4 addresses now?
No, but I remember the IPv4 addresses of Google Public DNS servers.
Kudos on your sharp memory, but I question the general usefulness of memorizing DNS server IP addresses. The whole point of DNS is that you set it up and then you don't have to remember addresses.
> We need to move away from typing addresses manually and toward things like multicast DNS anyway.
Why?
(I'm asking seriously, not to sound like a dick or anything.)
I (and I assume most humans) find it easier to remember names than numbers. That's why I use DNS or mDNS as much as possible even on small home networks. Since IPv4 addresses on such networks are always private, I can't rely on them staying the same forever if I have to restructure my network.
No. Because those are handled by DNS-servers now. If you expect us not to bother with IPs in an age where every single device on the face of the Earth has its unique, globally routable address, you're going to have to give us a DNS that handles them all.
IPv6-accessible sites need AAAA records just as IPv4-accessible sites need A records. You don't need AAAA records for every IPv6 node any more than you need an A record for every IPv4 node.
Even if I want to FTP to the PC in the other room from my laptop, I'd have to type the full v6 address (back to square minus one), a shorter NAT-ted-mangled address of some sort (back to square one), or a device name. As the addresses are globally routed, there needs to be a global DNS record for that PC and my laptop, otherwise we're back to addresses...
Clearly, you've never heard of Multicast DNS which is convenient for IPv4 networks as well as IPv6 ones. If you must use an IPv6 address to access a device on your local network, you can also use a link-local address which is at least as easy to remember as an IPv4 one.
Riiight, so when can we expect you bringing online the DNS-server that provides AAAAA-records for every single device on the planet so we don't have to deal with IP-addresses any more?
Do you surf web sites by typing in their IPv4 addresses now?
I have IPv6 through my ISP, Sonic.net. Whenever I use BitTorrent, I see plenty of IPv6 hosts. The reason is pretty obvious to me: if you're passing IPv6 through your home router, you have an externally-reachable IPv6 address ... but you may not have an externally-reachable IPv4 address thanks to your home router's NAT.
Presumably, this means that one incentive for home users getting IPv6 is to get a better-connected BitTorrent network. BitTorrent is pretty popular, but ISPs are never going to tell you "Get IPv6 so you can download movies ... er, I mean, Ubuntu Live CDs! ... faster."
Although Bittorrent is one of the peer to peer protocols that benefits from getting rid of NAT, I think a bigger case can be made for VoIP ones like SIP and XMPP Jingle (Google Talk). The tricks people have had to resort to make them work through NATs are horrific and don't always work. I expect Skype has to do similar things, but it's all secret.
Yeah, it lets you get rid of NAT (which was never really much of a problem).
But:
You've obviously never tried using a peer-to-peer protocol such as SIP or Bittorrent from behind a NAT. NAT has been a problem since it was invented and if we don't switch to IPv6 will continue to become worse as more layers of it are added.
Until then, it's like someone 40 years ago with a video phone showing "how cool" it is. Fabulous. But not much point until everyone else gets them too.
Video calling is poor metaphor for IPv6, which is an infrastructure upgrade rather than a new feature or application on an existing network. Again, you're missing the point that we must switch to IPv6 or experience increasingly difficult network configurations. Phone companies don't force many customers onto a party line or require them to call through multiple operators when numbers run out. They add digits or area codes. That's what IPv6 does for the Internet.
I can agree with this part. Practically the sole reason I'm fearing the change is that I'll no longer be able to set up devices and connections easily. As it stands right now, I take one look at an IPv6 address, and it's enough to make me blanch and think "Holy hellbore, how am I going to remember that monstrosity of an address??".
That's the kind of thinking you and everyone else needs to unlearn. IP addresses aren't supposed to be memorized, especially not IPv6 ones. The fact that we deal with IPv4 addresses so much is evidence of limitations of our current system based on scarcity of addresses.
Plus, ipv4 is easy to manage; your average network engineer has IPs memorized for when things break, or at least a somewhat logical addressing scheme so it's super-easy to guess the IP of a specific component when DNS breaks or is inaccessible, to be able to log into the device and fix it. the dot-quads make things really easy, four integers with a max of three digits (people memorize numbers and spelling most easily when broken down into chunks of three or less) per integer. It's going to require a lot of training, documenting, and large financial cost. It should have been done up front in 1998-1999 when the ipv6 spec was largely finalized, prototyped and tested, before broadband became truly mainstream. It would have been much cheaper to do the work as much of the Internet infrastructure was still being built, but it wasn't deemed profitable then because even right up to the dot-com bubble business analysts still insisted the Internet was just a fad. Now it's quite necessary, but ISPs don't want to do it because the expense could be immense.
There are reasons the cutover hasn't even been attempted yet. It's going to be costly in many ways.
IPv6 will be easier to manage when used properly, since manual address allocation and complex port forwarding rules won't be needed any more. We need to move away from typing addresses manually and toward things like multicast DNS anyway. There certainly will be a lot of training required since the old ways are so entrenched. The cost of the transition will only increase and ISPs that delay it are just digging their pits deeper. Since most corporations only seem to look at short term costs and benefits, I expect we'll see some pretty deep pits.
It really is weird having every machine in the house with a unique, globally addressable IP again after all these years behind a single public address using NAT. No more port forwarding.
You mean the Internet as designed isn't a pain to use? Who'd a thunk it?
I also haven't set up tunneling because it doesn't seem worth it right now. I place the blame for low IPv6 adoption squarely on the ISPs for not providing IPv6 addresses to all their customers. Doing that wouldn't interfere with current IPv4 configuration and in most situations would just work without any special configuration by customers. Perhaps one reason they're moving so slowly is they don't want to spend the money necessary to provide routers with decent IPv6 implementations. If I were really cynical, I'd say it's because the increasing scarcity of IPv4 addresses lets them charge a premium.
The interfaces should adapt to us, not the other way around.
So what's an example of a user interface that successfully adapts to the user? I submit the car as one of the must successful user interfaces ever. Do cars adapt to users or the other way around? I had to learn how to turn the steering wheel smoothly, apply throttle and brake and clutch smoothly.
Another example is the standard phone interface. For many decades, it was a dial. Gradually, that was replaced with the 3x3 dialpad which is still displayed on my Android phone. Neither adapts to the user, but the dialpad is still used on smartphones because that's what people are used to. Of course, I can also search my contacts textually or by voice, those are not standard interfaces, so there always has to be the dialpad to fall back on.
Once someone sees that the plus sign adds an alarm, then they'll know the plus sign adds an alarm. You only have to figure it out once.
I'm not elderly, but I'm old-ish (63) and I watch people my age struggle with very simple things because rather than learn the underlying concepts, they learn by rote. They learn "the second icon from the left does this". They don't bother to learn what the computer is really doing. Use words like "filesystem" and their eye glaze over. But without basic understanding of the technology, everything on the screen is going to be "magic" - if you don't understand the whys and wherefores, there is no hope of ever accomplishing anything but rote memorization.
I'd say about 90% of the time, they are perfectly well able to understand what's happening if they want - they just don't want to. You can't fix "don't want to learn". The ones who value learning, who don't have a culture of shutting of their brains and refusing to ever think, do just fine.
Of course this doesn't apply once certain disabilities like Alzheimer's enter the picture - that's a different problem and one no UI is going to fix.
I couldn't agree more. Metaphors only go so far. At some point, understanding of what's really going on is necessary. I've tried to help my grandfather (who is now in his 80s) use such things as VCRs and email several times and the main obstacle for him is impatience. He won't spend the time necessary to learn something totally different from what he's used to. AFAIK, he's still printing out each email he receives and deleting them from the inbox because he can't manage folders and searching old messages.
If the problem is that the 82-year-old gentlemen has a narrow field of view, perhaps you should haven't gotten a 27" monitor. You can make the text as big as you want on any size screen.
This reminds me of how so many people supposedly couldn't program their VCRs many years ago. My grandfather claimed he couldn't even though he had a VCR with on-screen programming, which was much easier to use than just the front display. However, I think his problem is mainly impatience. He never takes the time to learn a technology he isn't already familiar with. I've also tried to help him use his email better several times, but he always struggled with basic things like managing folders. AFAIK, he still prints every email he gets, deletes it immediately puts the printout in a drawer or file somewhere.
I'm sure the average iPhone app is far easier to use than the typical VCR from 20 years ago, but that doesn't mean everyone will be able to use it without experimentation or training. Despite claims to the contrary, there is no such thing as an intuitive interface. Obviously, an interface that's similar to something one has used before will be easier to get used to than a totally alien one, but it's impossible to design an interface that is equally familiar to everyone. If someone can't figure out how to use an iPhone app, I tend to think they should either get some training or go back to a "dumb" phone.
However their positives vastly outweigh their negatives. Otherwise they wouldn't be successful.
You're so right. I can't believe I didn't see it before. I'm dumping my installation of Ubuntu and getting a shiny new copy of Windows 7 immediately. I thought Thunderbird was pretty nice, but Outlook is much more popular, so it must be better. It's going to be expensive, but following the simple principle that if something's successful, it must be good will vastly simplify my life.
There are at least as many excellent reasons to like all of the examples, as well. Particularly for non-geek people who don't get caught up in silly software ethics arguments or meaningless technological purity battles.
I concede, sir. You have convinced me that ethics are an outdated, useless concept. If Steve says he knows what users need and Mark says there's no need for privacy any more, who are we to argue?