Category: Online Safety

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Dirty Rotten Scoundrels

If there’s one thing I hate it’s when people assume I’m an idiot and try to rip me off.

So when I got home today I opened the mailbox (yes, the real one!) to find this letter from a company called the Domain Renewal Group.  Their letter – which looked very much like an invoice –  was addressed to me as the owner of the domain betchablog.com and kindly informed me that this domain was due for renewal soon and that I should pay this as soon as possible.  The wording on the letter said that “the domain name registration is due to expire in the next few months“… and that… “Failure to renew your domain name by the expiration date may result in a loss of your online identity.”

All of that is true.  Betchablog.com IS coming up for renewal, and I DO need to renew it. The problem is that Domain Renewal Group are NOT my domain registrar, and they never have been.  I happen to have all of my various domains registered with GoDaddy, and I’ve never even heard of this other mob.

A closer reading of the letter reveals that all of the statements in their letter are technically correct, but written in such as way as to be misleading and underhanded in their deceptiveness.  The letter reads just like a regular renewal notice, but is in fact a transfer and renewal notice.  By signing it and sending it back with payment it would authorise them not just to renew the domain, but to take the domain away from the current registrar and move it their overpriced services.  How overpriced?  Well, I just took a look at GoDaddy’s site and it seems the going rate for a new .com domain is USD$10.69.  Their price for a domain transfer with 12 months renewal is only USD$6.99.  For the same thing, the Domain Renewal Group were about to charge unsuspecting or careless domain owners AUD$45 (about USD$41.50).

The thing is, there are many organisations where the bills are often paid by a different department to the ones that register the domains, that wouldn’t even question such an invoice when it arrived. The wording is sneaky enough, and the format looks enough like an invoice, that many people would just pay it without even questioning it.  I find this notion of trying to trick people into doing things they don’t mean to do is an appalling business practice.

There happened to be a Toronto-based phone number on the form so I rang it using Skype. The guy who answered asked what he could help me with, so I told him that I was very unimpressed with this deceptive and misleading way of doing business.   He sounded both surprised that someone would bother to call just to complain, but judging from his tone this was not the first time he’d had a complaint about it.  His response was a careless, “Like, whatever”, but he incorrectly assumed that there is nothing I can do about it other than complain.

He forgets that we live in an age where everyone is a publisher. He stupidly neglects to consider that the very customer base they are trying to mislead – those domain owners who own blogs and websites – are the exact same people who own their very own “personal printing presses” in the forms of blogs.  If you’re going to pull this scam-like crap on people, how stupid do you have to be to do it to people who can publicly tell the world about it?

My advice?  NEVER do business with the Domain Renewal Group.  Tell your friends never to do business with the Domain Renewal Group. And if I did have any domains registered with them I would be immediately transferring them elsewhere.

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Life is Risky

Silly me. I was mowing the lawn the other day and I stupidly managed to get my big toe caught in the mower blade while it was running at full speed.  The blades ripped right through my shoe and mangled the tip of my big toe.  Needless to say, it really hurt! I was home on my own, and had to figure out what to do next… there was blood going all over the place, I felt myself going into shock, as I tried to figure out how to get myself to a doctor.  It was not a lot of fun. The good news is that despite smashing my toenail off and slicing the end of my big toe, it could have been a hell of a lot worse.  Fortunately, the bone was not broken and I still have all my toes so apart from a bit of pain and inconvenience I think I’m pretty lucky.

It highlighted to me – in a very real way – that lawnmowers are bloody dangerous things! With their sharp, rapidly rotating blades, they are obviously capable of doing some real damage to the human body. Naturally, I never intended to get my toe in the way of the blades, but it happened regardless.

So I ask the question… are lawnmowers simply too damn dangerous? Does having an accident like this mean I should get rid of the mower and never mow the lawn again? Should I be campaigning for all mowers to be banned, as I am now clearly able to prove that they are dangerous things capable of causing serious injury.  Should my local council be stepping in and confiscating the lawnmowers of my neighbours in order to ensure that nobody else can ever have a similar accident?

The answer to the these questions is obviously no. While mowing your lawn can be a potentially dangerous activity, full of inherent risks and sharp rotating blades, it’s still something that needs to be done, and is done, by people all over the world every weekend.  Of course, mower manufacturers do what they can to limit the risks; the rotor is covered by a large protective guard so the blades are not directly exposed to fingers and toes. Within reason, lawnmowers are designed to be as safe as possible, but no design is 100% failsafe.  There are still significant risks, in fact over 60,000 people are injured by lawnmowers each year in the US alone, and many of these injuries result in amputation.  With such obvious dangers posed by lawnmowers, I can only assume that people must enjoy the value of having a nice looking lawn more than they are worried about the risks of using a mower to get one.

I’m pondering these ideas and thinking how they apply to the way most schools treat potential risks for their students.  While educators have a clear duty-of-care obligation to protect our students, we also have to balance that with the need to allow them to learn and to grow and to have opportunities.  Without being given a chance to fail and to make mistakes, they are missing valuable opportunities to learn from those mistakes. I think there has to be a balance between exposing them to risks and providing them with responsibilities.

Clearly, if the risk is a physical one that could cause genuine harm, injury or even death, then we need to err on the side of caution. If a student is likely to be injured or hurt then, yes, we probably need to place greater emphasis on protecting them from risk than providing a learning opportunity.  But if the risks are minimal, statistically unlikely, or have a relatively minor negative impact, then I think we should be encouraging our students to take a few risks and benefit from the possible opportunities.  You can’t live a life where you let the potential risks override the potential opportunities; if you do you’ll miss far too many wonderful opportunities.

I got thinking about this as I read through the comments on my previous post.  That post was about treating students with enough trust and respect to assume they will make good decisions for themselves if we provide them with enough opportunities to do so, and I finished that post by asking the question “What’s the worst thing that could happen?”  A couple of commenters pointed out that bad things certainly COULD happen if we don’t protect our students, and so we should continue protecting them by filtering, blocking and limiting access to web content that might be seen as “bad”.  As usual, the discussion revolved around the “what if we get sued for letting our children see/do/experience things that aren’t ‘safe’?” line of reasoning.  While I agree we need to keep kids safe, I think that this the wrong reason for wanting to do it.  Deciding what we will or won’t do based on whether we might get sued for it is simply an awful way to go through life.

You know what? We can try to protect ourselves from risk for the rest of our lives. We can avoid doing anything remotely dangerous, just in case we get hurt.  We can wrap ourselves in cotton wool, cloistering ourselves away from anything we might find bad, distasteful, dangerous, offensive or disagreeable. We can live a life where we reduce all potential risk by avoiding all potential dangers, but in the process we miss far too many potential opportunities and I’d question whether that’s really actually living.

Many years ago I read the following poem by Kent M Keith that very much struck a chord with me.  I think it nicely captures what I’ve been trying to say in this post…

  1. People are illogical, unreasonable, and self-centered.  Love them anyway.
  2. If you do good, people will accuse you of selfish ulterior motives.  Do good anyway.
  3. If you are successful, you win false friends and true enemies.  Succeed anyway.
  4. The good you do today will be forgotten tomorrow.  Do good anyway.
  5. Honesty and frankness make you vulnerable.  Be honest and frank anyway.
  6. The biggest men and women with the biggest ideas can be shot down by the smallest men and women with the smallest minds.  Think big anyway.
  7. People favor underdogs but follow only top dogs.  Fight for a few underdogs anyway.
  8. What you spend years building may be destroyed overnight.  Build anyway.
  9. People really need help but may attack you if you do help them.  Help people anyway.
  10. Give the world the best you have and you’ll get kicked in the teeth.  Give the world the best you have anyway.

Oh, and I’d probably add number 11.  Mowers are dangerous. Mow the lawn anyway.

I think we owe it to ourselves – and our students – to create a life of true significance, where we decide to do things because they make our lives richer and more meaningful. It’s a very sad state of affairs when we start deciding what we will allow into our lives based on whether we might get hurt or offended or sued.

Yes, life is risky. Live it anyway.

Image Credit: Chris Betcher – CC BY-SA-NC
http://www.flickr.com/photos/betchaboy/4374316167/

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You are what you Tweet

Someone once said to me that if you do something once, it’s an accident. Do it twice and it’s a coincidence.  Do it three or more times and that’s just the way you’re living. The underlying message is that if you repeat something enough, then the patterns of use start to tell their own story. Your repeated activity starts to build up into a pattern of use and looking at those patterns can often give insights into the activity that are not apparent by looking at the individual instances of the activity.

This idea of allowing data to “rest where it lays” and deriving insights from it is essentially the idea behind tag clouds, whose patterns reflect repeated use of words, tags, keywords or ideas.  If you look at someone’s Delicious tag cloud and see the patterns emerging in the form of highlighted, emphasised words, then you see a clear indication of what interests that person.  The more they bookmark using tags, the more evident their interests.  The numbers don’t lie when there are enough of them.

if you aggregate enough tag clouds you start to get an insight into the “patterns of the patterns” – you see not just the interests of individuals emerging, but the interests of the group. This is the whole notion of a folksonomy, and it taps into the fascinating concept of the “wisdom of the crowds”.  Data, especially when you have enough of it to form reliable patterns, starts to become very interesting.

In the same spirit, I was a little intriugued by a twitter app I saw today, called TweetPsych.  TweetPsych looks at the contents of your last 1000 messages on Twitter, analyses the words you use and the way your sentences are constructed, and tries to draw conclusions about what you do, what interests you, and what sort of person you might be – psychologically speaking.  I’ve no idea how accurate it might be, but it’s an interesting idea. I’ll be honest and admit to you that I have absolutely no idea what they really mean, but here’s my results anyway… http://tweetpsych.com/?name=betchaboy.

Regardless of whether TweetPsych is accurate and up to scratch just yet or not, I think it signals an interesting development in what is sure to become a much bigger deal.  The notion that some level of machine intelligence can be derived from an analysis of massive amounts of our online footprints.  We are all leaving massive amounts of data behind us as we trawl around the Net, and somewhere in that trail of data there are machines piecing together an accurate picture of us… what we like, where we go on holidays, who we talk to, what our preferences are, and so on.  It’s not a new idea – Google’s entire advertising strategy is based on the concept of knowing more and more about you – but seeing TweetPsych’s attempt at psychoanalysing me from these 140 character snippets of my thoughts just threw it into a new light.

Let’s just hope that this data can be put to use in positive, creative ways that help enhance our lives.

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