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Oyster annoyance

Mary & I were both overcharged on a recent jaunt around London. The barriers beeped and didn't let me out, so the station staff opened the barrier to let me through. The barriers did let Mary out, but it turned out she had been charged two lots of the we-didn't-see-you-touch-out-so-we'll-take-four-pounds.

(Oyster is London's RFID-based ticketing system. You can put travelcards on them, but I use it as a pay-as-you-go card. It charges you for each journey and they promise not to charge you more than the equivalent travelcard. In practice this goes wrong a bit: it's a very complex system, and the software must be a nightmare.)

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Harvard Business Review Fuckwittage

It's a little thing, but if we are to have a hope of educating users to protect themselves online that reputable sites don't behave just like the fraudsters.

Here's a quick spot of fuckwittery from Harvard Business Review.

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Halifax Stupidity

Argh.

The front page of Halifax's online banking has an extravagantly stupid 'feature'.

Somehow, they have managed to publish their warnings about phishing attacks so that they look like, well, a bit of a phishing attack!

Pictures of the stupidity

Amazon patent decent URLs for search

A long time ago, I wrote gallery.future-i.com, and I was particularly exercised about using clean URLs (and still am).

One place I feel I did a really nice job was in making the search URLs pretty nice, e.g. a search for 'mary' lives at:

http://gallery.future-i.com/search/mary

I did that in the middle of 2001, and I expect plenty of others did similar things by then, too. For me, the tricky bit is all done by Apache's mod_rewrite, which takes incoming requests to your web site, and let's you rejig it to pass parameters to scripts without exposing all that grunge to the outside world. It isn't the only way to do it, but it is powerful and effective.

My annoyance now is that Amazon have a patent on a very similar technique, covering URLs for search results of the form http://somedomain/flibble, filed in 2004.

I was impressed by Amazon's A9 when it launched, principally for the clean URLs for search.

That doesn't mean they own the idea, which is plainly in play before that. And don't get me started on parallel invention, making it all the sillier.

I hope the patent boils away in a sea of prior art.

[Via Buzz Out Loud #589, Slashdot coverage]

Google un-sells videos

So, Google are shutting down their DRM-backed video sales and rental service. Instead of giving customers the video they 'bought' or a proper refund Google are giving them a "bonus" voucher to spend through Google Checkout, which rusts in 60 days.

Back in the day, we understood the simple cases of:

• you have bought this
• you have borrowed this
• and, you have rented this

DRM intends to make the middle case go away, and skew the first to be a wierd and different thing. If we choose to build technology that breaks these norms, we're going to need much clearer language than 'download-to-own' and 'buy' to cover all of the new possibilities for worse-than-before media.

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'Verified' by Visa

While using my Halifax Visa card online recently, I bumped into the Verified by Visa programme.

It's a nice idea, in theory, but the implementation I saw was woeful. It was depressingly similar to a phishing attack, warmly assuring me about security by chatting about it in the Web page, while hiding the parts of my browser that can tell me that more sensibly.

Like most geeks, I try and educate my less geeky family and friends about how to behave safely with technology. Things like this make that job harder.

Update at 17:51 EDT, 21^st April 2007 – Follow-up: Guardian coverage

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