Using Spoof Card Could Get You Time

October 22, 2009

Phone pranks have finally arrived in the 21st century and they're called "spoofing." Thanks to a new service called SpoofCard, which allows people to make calls via the Internet, subscribers can change the phone number callees see on their caller ID display, they can change their voice so that they sound like someone else and they can record phone calls.

In last few days, Ali Wise, publicity director for Dolce and Gabbana, has gotten into a bunch of trouble (and has gotten fired) for using SpoofCard to access the voice-mail accounts of girlfriends/finaces of ex-lovers. It was easy enough to do. She changed her own number to match the number she was calling. Not realizing the call was an imposter, the voice-mail service automatically granted access to the voice-mail accounts.

Broadband Internet Becomes a Legal Requirement in Finland

October 15, 2009

While those of us in the United States are arguing over whether health care is a legal right, the folks over in the Northern Europe are ensuring that all citizens have access to broadband Internet. The law, the first of its kind in any country, forces Internet providers to offer Internet connections that run at speeds of at least 1 megabit per second to all of the country's 5.3 million citizens.

I have two thoughts.

1) Sure the United States is a huge country and it would be a challenge to offer broadband to all of its citizens. But you'd think that our country, which invented the Internet and is a major leader in the industrialized world, would at least have broadband available to a large portion of its people. But it didn't even make the top 10 list of countries offering broadband.

2) And this gets back to my point about healthcare. If you have to argue and fight for universal healthcare, good luck with universal broadband. 

Photo: Digital Vision/Getty

How Do Researchers Find Out How People Filter Science Info?

October 23, 2008

Two days ago, I posted a blog about Dietram Schuefele's study that we may wasting our time trying to educate the public about scientific issues without first trying understand how people will filter the information. That's all well and good, but I wondered how researchers could, in Schuefele's words develop "a better understanding of how different groups will filter or reinterpret this information when it reaches them, given their personal value systems and beliefs"?

I posed the question to Schuefele and here's what he said:

• Science needs to stop looking at research as separate from its societal impacts. For emerging technologies like nano and stem cell research, the boundaries between science, politics, and ethics are
increasingly blurry, and many of the questions raised over human enhancement or virtually invisible surveillance devices have more to do with ethics than with understanding the science behind them. And the reluctance on the part of many scientists to address these questions stifles any dialogue with the
public.

• Our research shows that information is not everything. In fact, the same piece of information may mean very different things to different people, depending on their value systems or beliefs. The assumption that we can simply put the facts out there and expect the public to "get it" eventually is naïve.  rather, we need to understand what people's concerns and hopes are, which cultural and social factors shape these hopes and concerns, and how we can use this knowledge to communicate with the public in a way that (a) reaches as many different groups as possible, and (b) addresses their concerns and questions in a way that makes sense to them.

Photo: Betsie Van der Meer