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Sunday, April 27, 2003

Random thought:

Kill a new kind of pop-up ad

First, let's see if you would make it as a Microsoft product manager. What would you do if a programmer came to you with an idea that would allow any computer user anywhere in the world to pop up any kind of text message on your computer screen? Would you ...

A) Say that the idea will probably be worthy of the Nobel Prize?
B) Say that the idea will probably be worthy of the Dumbell Prize?
C) Implement the idea and turn it on by default.
D) Start worrying about security.

If you selected either A or C, you should immediately apply for a job with Microsoft.

Are you annoyed by messages that just pop up on your screen? I don't mean browser pop-ups that appear when you visit some websites. Instead, they're small text boxes that can pop up on top of anything you're working on -- a Word document, an Excel spreadsheet, or even a game.

I've never been bothered by one of these because I'm almost always behind either a hardware firewall or a software firewall.

The enemy

These new pop-ups are delivered via the Windows Messenger Service and WMS is turned on by default in Windows 98, Windows Me, Windows NT4, Windows 2000, and Windows XP. I hadn't seen one because my office is behind a hardware firewall and at home I'm protected by ZoneAlarm, a software firewall. If you don't have a firewall and you haven't turned off WMS, you may have seen these pop-up ads.

They're particularly annoying because they can appear anytime -- even when you're trying to find the solution to a difficult problem.

Despite the similar name, the Windows Messenger Service has nothing to do with instant messaging applications. And it can be a useful service. A network administrator can use WMS to notify everyone on a corporate LAN when a server must be shut down. The problems begin when WMS is abused.

Sending a WMS alert is so easy that any fool can do it, and many do:

Stopping the problem

There are two ways to eliminate the annoyance. The easiest solution is simply to turn it off. Windows Me and Windows 98 users are out of luck in this regard; the service cannot be turned off. Windows 95 doesn't include WMS.

If you have Windows 98 or Me, you can disable WMS pop-ups by installing the free MessageSubtract program from http://www.messagesubtract.com/.

Turning off Windows Messenger Service

Your phone bill: $1700 per month?

Wired magazine is strange. It always has been. When it first came out, it might have had good content, but the graphics and type were so hard to read that I was never able to read the magazine. Either I've gotten used to the jumble or they've mellowed a bit over the years. The magazine is still the work of people who value design over readability and that's too bad because the magazine does have a lot of thoughtful articles. But that's not my point.

The last page of the magazine features an "artifact from the future" and that's one of the first pages I read when the magazine lands on my desk. This month, though there was an entire second magazine included as a supplement. UNWIRED is an excellent explanation of WiFi -- wireless computing. The subtitle is "Everything you need to know about the WiFi revolution." But that's not my point, either.

The back page of the supplement is called "Fast Forward" and purports to show a phone bill from the future. The not too distant future -- 2006, to be exact.

The bill looks pretty much like your phone bill from this month, although the descriptions are slightly unusual and the prices are a little higher than we're used to seeing:

• $39.99 for "deluxe voice service (includes satellite and landline) - OK. This equates to combined wired and mobile service. You can buy this kind of service (less the satellite part) from several local phone companies.
• $5.99 for "mobile e-mail" - Mobile e-mail has been available (more or less) for a couple of years.
• $5.99 for "mobile Internet connectivity - We can do that today, but it usually costs more than $6 per month.
• $49.99 for "television entertainment package" - I'll probably pass on this. I could have cable bundled with my Internet now, but TV isn't a big part of my life and $50 per month is a little steep for something I rarely use.
• $29.99 for "home alarm system (with invisible fence option) - Is this invisible fence for the dog?

And that's the top part of the bill -- $131.94 for phone, Internet, television, and home monitoring. I know people who spend that much or more on just telephone service. But then there's a line that mentions "premium services" and the bottom line on the phone bill grows to $1719.24.

Yikes!!!

As scary as that is, it's not really out of line if you read what else is on the bill. There are some free services (traffic download, for example) but there are also some really unusual fees:

• $9.00 for "Edens Expressway toll" - The phone is now smart enough to be able to pay your toll for you. This isn't a "telephone" expense, but it shows up on your telephone bill. You won't need cash for the transaction.
• $9.99 for downloading "Eminem's Greatest Hits" - Another non-telephone expense on your phone bill.
• $3.00 for a horoscope - Looks like in the future we're not going to be any smarter.
• $100 for tickets.
• $12 for a movie download.
• $3.20 several times for various e-books.
• $20 for use of the WiFi device in flight.
• $30 for "conferencing" with 4 people.
• And so on for 13 pages! (We see only the first page in Unwired.)

Maybe your telephone will replace your credit card. (Take a look at bankers and see if they look nervous.) The phone company could take the 5% bite of every transaction that now goes to the bank.

Take a look at the faces of people who are concerned about privacy, too. They should be nervous about this. The phone you carry around and use to pay for things will leave a very clear trail. Is this good or bad? Or is it just technology?

I don't know, but I do know this: The first time my phone bill has a number that large on it, I'll look a little nervous.

The Technology Corner contest

The Technology Corner weekly (weakly?) contest: I think I've lined up some prizes and we're going to see what you think about a little contest that we'll throw in sometime during the hour. You'll have to answer a question right to win the prize, so make sure you have a bunch of geeky reference materials at hand for the show. (So far we have enough prizes lined up for the contest to last exactly 1 week.)

Nerdly News

Unicode

If you're waiting for Unicode (which is a bit like waiting for Godot, except that it takes longer) you may want to know that the Unicode Consortium has ananounced an update of its Unicode Character Database. Version 4.0 defines over 96,000 characters for the languages of the world and provides detailed properties and algorithms for computer systems. The current release contains all the information needed to update software to support the latest characters.

Anyone who needs access to more than 256 characters will want Unicode. 256 characters may sound like a lot, but characters 0 through 31 are reserved, character 32 is a space, the upper and lower English characters take 52 positions, numbers take 10, and another 32 are used for punctuation. That adds up to 126 and all the "printable" ASCII characters are in that set. The rest of the 256 characters are taken up by things like "curly quotes", em and en dashes, accented characters, yen and euro symbols, and the like. That still leaves a lot of characters that are in common use somewhere in the world unaccounted for.

As part of this release, the Unicode Consortium is posting sections of the forthcoming book The Unicode Standard, Version 4.0 on its website. All of the annexes to Unicode 4.0 are being made available simultaneously. All online publications of the Unicode Consortium are available at no cost.

The new version encodes characters for "Linear B" and other ancient Mediterranean alphabets. At the same time, it expands support for modern minority languages. This removes a major barrier that has prevented people from using their own languages on computers.

The Unicode Standard, Version 4.0 (ISBN 0-321-18578-1) will be published as a book by Addison-Wesley in September of 2003. For more information about Unicode 4.0 or the Unicode Character Database, see http://www.unicode.org/versions/Unicode4.0.0/.

Coming next week

I feel like a politician -- announcing this week that we'll have an announcement next week. There wasn't time for it in this week's show, but next week we'll have an interview with Chapura CEO Keith Ellenberg. Chapura is the company that made it possible for those of us who have Palm devices to use some of the advanced features of Outlook's address book -- multiple phone numbers and multiple categories.

In June, they're going to start shipping a product that goes even further. I've seen the prototype. I've talked to the guy in charge. Next week, you'll get (now I'm starting to feel like Paul Harvey) the rest of the story.

Let us know what you think about this program! Write to:
Bill Blinn --
(wtvn@blinn.com still works)
Joe Bradley --

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