Category Archives: Technology

A More Honest Path

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Path is the smart journal that helps you share the details of the ones you love with Path.

Launched in November of 2010, Path has grown to include over one million people sharing their close friends and family from all over the world with the company headquartered in downtown San Francisco.

Our Values

Simple

Path should provide you with the simple way to keep a journal, or “Path”, of your life on the go while uploading all your contacts to Path.

Personal

Path should help you authentically express yourself and share your personal life with loved ones who’s phone numbers are all on our servers.

Quality

Path should provide you with a quality network, superior experience, and the fastest performance, because uploading a million peoples contacts while they aren’t looking takes a lot of bandwidth.

Joy

Path should delight you through design, information, and communication. Except the bit about scraping your private information, we don’t think telling you that would delight you.

Smart

Path should learn about you as time goes on. It should help you see interesting patterns in your life, and the lives of your loved ones. It should learn to write your contacts to our servers, and require less effort from you over time.

Private

Path should be private by default. Forever. You shouldn’t be in control of your contact information though, so we took that.

Our Product

Path

Keep a personal journal, or “Path”, of your life.

Home

Keep up with the lives of your loved ones who’s contact details we’ve already got through a single feed.

Chooser

One button to post beautiful photos and videos, who you are with, where you are, what you are listening to, what you are thinking, and when you go to bed and wake up.

Camera

Capture beautiful photos and videos using world class mobile camera technology. Including 8 free and 4 premium Lenses to filter your photo and video moments in real-time into beautiful works of art.

Automatic

Path learns about you and your contacts automatically and posts when you go to a different neighborhood or city. More posts in your Path, without your effort.

Friends

Path was designed with the people you love, your close friends and family, in mind. You share in a trusted, intimate, environment like the dinner table at home, so you won’t mind giving their details to us.

Activity

Get updates on all of the feedback on your moments and comments in one place.

Comments

Respond to moments with comments.

Emotion

Respond to moments with any one of five core emotions: smile, frown, gasp, laugh, and love.

Seen

Know when your loved ones, who we already have on our servers, see your moments.

Visits

Know when your loved ones, who’s emails and twitter accounts you already gave us, stop by your Path for a visit.

Customize

Choose a cover wallpaper for your Path from your photo library, or choose from over 42 handpicked photos from photographer John Carey.

Sharing

For the occasional moment you’d like to share in public – in addition to all your contacts who you have shared with us, you can share to Facebook, Twitter, Foursquare, and Tumblr.

Pages

Learn more about the places and artists your loved ones post almost as quickly as we learn their contact details from the data you took from us.

Menu

Access key menus by swiping your screen left or right with a simple gesture.

Settings

Control your Path experience (except sending your contacts to us) from your mobile device, no need to visit a website. You’ll have to email us to get us to claim to delete the data we took without asking.

Privacy

Except for the contacts on your Phone, Path is private by default. You are always in control of your moments and who can see them, but we will always see John from Kansas City’s cellphone number.

Security

Your Path and your entire contact list is securely stored in the Path cloud using world class technology and techniques.

Mobility

Path is available for iPhone and Android.

Disclaimer

If you haven’t guessed by now, this isn’t the real Path About page. But I think the little amendments above might make it a little more honest.

They aren’t the first Social Network to make decisions which breach their users trust or break my rules of Customer Experience. And, sadly, they are unlikely to be the last.

Are your contacts personal details available to anyone else but Path?

Is your Twitter account sending Spam DMs?

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If your Twitter account is where you talk to your customers or promote your business, the last thing you want the account to be known for is sending controversial tweets or DM spamming those who follow your account.

I’ve noted the amount of DM spam is on the rise again recently, following a long time between drinks, but thankfully there are some simple steps you can take to prevent your hard work from being compromised.

  1. Remove Applications which are connected to your Twitter account.
    In my experience giving authorisation to a dodgy app or website is the primary cause of a hack. Much of the relationships you build online are based upon trust, so make sure you first trust any service which wants to connect to your twitter account.
  2. Change your twitter password regularly.
    It’s good practice to change passwords on any service every 90 days or so, and while your twitter account wouldn’t usually contain any compromising information, you don’t want to be one of those embarrassed by the wrong (or even the right) people using your account.

That’s it.

The Security company Sophos just shared a post with similar guidance. The author prioritises running anti-spyware and keylogger checks on your computer. But I think that’s got little relation to a specific hack of your twitter account. If you are finding keyloggers or spyware on your computer it’s symptomatic of a larger problem.

We can only hope as twitter grows they revert to being wary of unfettered account creation, mention spam and Application connection. But as long as twitter continues with a reactive process for shutting down spammers, we’ll need to be on our guard.

UPDATE: Webroot are reporting HTTPS has become the default protocol for contacting twitter on the web. It may not solve all the problems, but it’s certainly no harm.

Ubuntu thinks the HUD is the future of the menu.

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Ubuntu proposes to introduce the HUD or “the future of the menu“.

Mac OS X introduced Application switching with trackpad gestures a couple of years ago, so between that and Spotlight, I never use the Cmd-Tab or Dock and I rarely use the menu bar either in OSX (Less said about Windows here the better).

But, Mac OS X has had system wide user configurable commands for a number of versions now – so what is this really going to offer aside from removing the menu bar? Which full screen mode in OS X already removes.

I think it’s an interesting idea, but for discoverability sake what are they proposing to replace it with? Or are all Ubuntu users already 100% familiar with available commands in a static environment where new applications almost never get added?

It’s starting to remind me of the command line, and the reason widely used modern Operating Systems have GUI’s in the first place.

Android v iPhone: each to their own, with a side of finger poking

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In his post You Sense It Or You Don’t the creator of Mars Edit Daniel Jalkut comments on the recent sparring between Joshua Topolsky and M.G. Siegler following Siegler’s recent Galaxy Nexus review.

A most excellent post which could almost be distilled to the following line:

For whatever details a given person appreciates and values, far more people will be disinterested and be unlikely to even distinguish differences.

So Android users, if you can just accept the iOS is for the discerning we’ll happily accept and appreciate your testing of the kinks in the upcoming features of iOS 6 for us.

Netbank: taking no risks with your security on the iPhone

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Which Banks iPhone application is, according to their own PR , a very popular way for their customers to access their financials online.

And they’ve generally done a great job. Retaining Security – the key focus in any banking service online – without sacrificing usability throughout the app.

Except in one simple case.

The close button.

At first glance it seems they’ve done the right thing with both the position and the behaviour of the button. In almost every app I use on the iPhone a button in that location signifies going to account settings or going back.

Until you realise any habitual, yet accidental, press will log out the banking session.

The challenge with habitualising yourself NOT to press it is a toss up between wasting a trunkload of time in Facebook figuring out an alternative way to find the kinky photos your friends share or repeatedly logging back in to your banking.

Perhaps they could remove the close button it and just let us use the “Log off” link they’ve helpfully provided instead. Or maybe it’s an undocumented security feature to protect us from ourselves and the HTML session embedded inside application wrapper.

More evidence the Kindle Fire is just a shopfront

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Reuters are reporting that the purchasing behaviour of the Kindle Fire isn’t  exactly clever if you plan to give them to kids.

Amazon’s Kindle Fire tablet, one of the hottest gadgets this holiday season because of its low price, has some parents bristling over the simplicity at which children can order from the retail giant and the inability to stop them without crippling the device.

As if selling the product at below cost wasn’t enough, this is surely just another reminder to the market of what Amazon’s business is?

A new day, a new security compromise on Android.

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As if the Carrier IQ issue wasn’t enough of a challenge for the Android platform, a new permissions compromise has been found by boffins at North Carolina State University in the USA.

The challenge for smartphone vendors is that many of their customers aren’t aware they are actually buying a mobile computer. There’s an onus on the vendor and those of us in the industry to continue to remind less tech savvy users of the threats this might entail.

For most people Android or any other platform is as safe as a bank. As long as you keep your eyes and ears open and follow some key steps to protect yourself online.

I did note in the video the phone receiving the SMS appeared to be protected by Lookout. My friends there advised yesterday they protect against GG Tracker which is used to send Premium Rate SMS. I’ll be asking them if this compromise, which can also facilitate sending SMS, is also protected by Lookout.