Ian On The Red Dot

On Friday, after TDM’s Blogout09, TDM-IDA hosted a dinner for a bunch of entrepreneurs at My Secret Garden. Howie and Daniel were kind enough to invite me to join them.

The dinner was a great chance to be acquainted with interesting entrepreneurs and partake in some engaging conversations. One conversation which really struck a chord arose from Yongfook sharing the reasoning process he was going through to consider Singapore as his next place of residence. A point was made that it was particularly interesting that foreigners were choosing Singapore as a place to stay while Singaporeans were desiring to leave the country.

I too have a particular yearning to leave Singapore to stay and work overseas.

The question is why?

I love Singapore and I know that I will always call this place my home. If I leave, I know I will return. My desire to leave the country has nothing to do with ill feelings about the country or the government or even the PAP. So why do I have this yearning that expands each day I remain on this little red dot till a void that is so expanse that even Moses could not cross forms within my soul. Why do some other Singaporeans feel the same thirst to travel, the same hunger to leave.

During the conversation, I offered an explanation – Singapore was too small. You must be thinking, “No shit Sherlock”. The size is only the cause. The effect of that size is that it allows few of us to change, it prevents us from escaping our friends.

Our friends. People who love us. People who have an idea of our identity. An identity that sometimes they hold onto more strongly than we do ourselves.

“I didn’t know you were into cooking.”

“You sure don’t look like the sort who will paint.”

“You sure you can go to the gym consistently. Think you will just stop like before.”

“Dancing? hahahah… You? hahahhaah…”

For inexplicable reasons, our friends trap us in a box. In a prison where they will shoot us down as we make for the fences that constrains us within a given identity. They have a painting of our identity and it isn’t cubist.

Singaporeans need to leave Singapore to grow. Away from the eyes of well-intentioned and kaypoh friends, we have a chance to change.

Like the ugly caterpillar that needs to crawl away and hide inside a cocoon, we need to leave Singapore, so that we can undergo the process of metamorphosis, to change into a butterfly.

Or as Bill would say, or at least I think that’s what he said, we need to go on our own heroic journey, our own personal odyssey. Here is a thought to our worrying government – Odysseus did not begin his journey with the fall of Troy. He began his journey when he left Ithaca – he left home and returned home.

For most of us, a wandering we must.

This post doesn’t really have anything to do with the photos related to the scandal that have been appearing on the net. This post is more related to this case in America where a lady sent a laptop for repair and it got lost than about sex. The Geek Squad’s technicians are supposedly always on the lookout for compromising material on their consumers’ computers.

A few months ago, my computer had some problems. I had some suspicion that it might be due to the power adapter so I went down to the support center for help. I told the lady at the counter my suspicions and she said she needed to take a look at my computer. I passed it to her along with my power adapter and she proceeded to take them to the backroom.

Here is the thing. She closed the door. She took a long time to come out. I got anxious and impatient. I also got pissed. She didn’t need to bring my computer and the power adapter to the backroom to test them. She could have tested at the counter. There were power points there. She didn’t need the computer to actually test the power adapter because she had a similar model and could have tested the power adapter with that model. She also didn’t need to take a long time just to test a power adapter.

I asked her colleague to call her out. I tried to get my computer back but she was insistent that she needed to test it in the room.

There isn’t anything in my computer which normally would be considered worth stealing to spread – no nude pictures. However, there is data which I consider private and wouldn’t want to be copied. Or lost.

I told my friends about the incident and they said I was being paranoid. I don’t think I am and with recent cases about how data on computers sent for servicing have been compromised, I’m more sure than ever I was right.

We as users of computers got to start being more aware of the value and sanctity of the data on our computers as well as our phones. Companies need to value our data more and provide transparency when servicing our computers. For example, there really isn’t a need for a hidden backroom. I suggest such rooms should be done BreakTalk style – with a glass so that we can see what’s going on.

In the end though, you can’t really trust anyone. My suggestion is this – make backups for everything important. When your computer is spoiled, bring it for servicing. If it needs to be taken away from you and can’t be fixed on the spot, decline the offer. Write off the computer and buy a new one. Reload data from your backup. Same thing for phone. Once spoiled, consider it a write off and buy a new one. Don’t compromise your contacts by sending it in for repair.

It is a crazy world out there and easter egg hunts won’t stop being popular. Just don’t let your computer and phone be where the game is played.

On a final note, this is the best quote for non-customer service I have seen. Ever.

“For every customer that has had an unpleasant experience I can show you hundreds who have had a great experience. I have been in retail for a long time and the one conclusion I have come to is that not every customer can be satisfied. Does my store have opportunities? Absolutely! What I can say is that we strive to deliver the experience that every customer deserves to receive.”

Recently, someone posed as a representative of Nuffnang and posted a bunch of comments on a blog. The(new)mediaslut wrote a blog post giving advice on how to deal with the issue of an imposter. That post highlighted steps that can be taken after the fact of impersonation.

So the question I asked myself was how to prevent anyone from posing as a representative of a company in this new online media landscape with blogs and comments.

Specifically, how does a representative of a company establish his or her identity?

There are two ways which I am aware of.

1. Leave your name, email and site’s URL.

Presumably, the email you leave will be a secret which is used to identify yourself to the blog’s administrators. However, emails are easily harvested and it is actually a trivial thing to find out the email used by the representative of a company.

2. Install a blog commenting system to handle the identity of commentators.

Four examples of such systems:

a. http://www.sezwho.com/
b. http://disqus.com/
c. http://www.cocomment.com/
d. http://www.intensedebate.com/

There are a few problems with such systems:

1. The system has to be integrated with a blog.

2. Unless the services all use OpenID, people who like to comment regularly would need to have an account for each system.

3. Even if all the systems implemented OpenID, data regarding the comments made by a user would be stored in separate data silos with no aggregation of data across services.

So, I would like to propose a possible solution.

There will be a company, let’s call it COTRD, which establishes itself as an identity verification service for companies. COTRD is responsible for authenticating a user’s identity – the user is verified to represent the company or a company can setup accounts to be used by their representatives. The commentator, representing a site or company, who would like to establish his identity on a blog, first logs into COTRD to post the comment. Once the comment has been posted on COTRD, the user then posts the same comment on the other site with a link back to the comment on COTRD.

The idea behind this solution is to make use of the third field in the form when leaving a comment – the ‘Website’ field. Most people would just enter a URL for a domain (i.e. ian.onthereddot.com). What if, instead of just leaving the domain name of the website, the URL left is a permanent address to a comment hosted on COTRD?

Since, only the authenticated representative of the company could have left the comment on COTRD, if the comment on COTRD matches the comment on the blog, then that comment must have been made by the representative.

An analogy would be this. Only two people have the key to a house. Let’s call them Boy A and Girl B. Girl B receives a note from a stranger who claims the note is from Boy A. The note contains the words – ‘I Love You’. Now, Girl B goes back to the house, and sees the words ‘I Love You’ on the wall. Since only Boy A could have left those words because he was the only other person with a key to the house, then the note, or at least the words on the note, must have been from Boy A.

Of course, an astute observer might ask why can’t a company just post the comment on their own blog as a post. They could. But blog posts and comments are two different beasts and a company might not want to muddle up the content of their blog with every comment they had to post on other blogs.

A company could of course set up a separate blog where only comments are posted on it, so COTRD would have to provide other services to companies using its service.

Below is a comment highlighting the use of a service like COTRD.