Beware the Phish that Bites

Protecting against viruses and malware isn't easy, but it seems to me that compared to protecting againt phishing, it certainly seems easier and more straightforward. Because phishing depends on social engineering, the only real protection is the intelligence and caution of the user. We'll talk with an expert about how you can protect yourself and your comptuer.

Here, for example, is an example from an idiot spammer. I had been receiving messages about the "Ford Dealer Columbus Day Clearance", many of them promising 50% to 90% off the manufacturer's suggested retail price, but then the spammer apparently decided to give General Motors a try and changed the subject to "Chevy" while accidentally leaving "Ford" in the introduction and then sliding back to "Chevy" for the rest of the message.

Sky King is the consumer product leader for the Zone Alarm division of CheckPoint Software. I wonder if he thinks my assessment of the dangers of phishing attacks is accurate.

If your browser doesn't support flash, here is a direct link.

This isn't an e-mail and it may not be fraudulent. The message appeared as an advertisement on a download page. It's not a message from Windows, but it's designed to look like one. In my mind, that's fraud.

The dialog box appears to have two buttons (Restart Now and Postpone), but they arent' really buttons. In fact, clicking anywhere on the rectange (including the "X" that makes it appear that it would close the box) will simply run whatever lurks behind the link.

What happens if you click this box? I don't know and I decided not to find out.

Upending Creativity, Adobe Style

This would be an incredible time to be an illustrator or a designer. Or a film maker. A book publisher or magazine editor. An audio specialist. If you touch anything that involves creating any kind of media, this has to be a great time to be alive.

This week's Adobe MAX conference reminded me of a time in the late 1980s when I was creating advertising materials for a software company. I would write copy, run it through a program I had written to count the characters and give me an approximate length (in inches) for the content. I'll come back to that later, but first -- what's so cool about the updates?

I want a screen this big!!!

Creative Cloud and Collaboration

Two years ago, I cautiously said that Creative Cloud seemed like a good idea. No small number of creatives pushed back, saying that it cost too much (actually it costs less if you're someone who buys every single update) or that they didn't want to do all their work online (you don't have to). Or they just opposed the software rental model.

Earlier this year, Adobe released the second version of Creative Cloud along with several mobile apps for Ipads. At this week's Adobe MAX, they released the next iteration of Creative Cloud and updated mobile apps for Ipads and Iphones. Yes, phones. Not yet Android or Microsoft devices, but the word is that they're coming ... sometime.

And those mobile apps are no longer just free-standing apps. Because of the Creative Cloud and an enhanced Creative Profile function, they make it possible to capture, create, and edit photos, illustrations, publications, and even videos on a phone. A phone!?

So I feel like designers are at a remarkable intersection where creativity meets technology and everybody wins. Watching the presentations at Adobe MAX really made me wish that I could take all of this technology back to the 1980s. I can't even begin to imagine what I might have done with it then.

But I certainly can imagine what creatives around the world will be able to do with this incredible technology today.

My Favorites

I couldn't even begin to explain all of the new features of all the new components of Creative Cloud in a single program. In fact, I couldn't begin to describe all of the new features of any single component of Creative Cloud in a single program. There will be time for details later. For now, though, I thought I'd just mention the 5 bits that lit a rocket under my chair.

It was hard to pick just 5 because everything in the Creative Cloud suite has been updated and then there are all the new and updated mobile apps to consider.

The mobile apps are enough to make me wish that I had an Iphone, but because I don't, they give me something to look forward to when the mobile apps are eventually ported to Android devices.

SUPER HIT 1: To borrow from the lexicon of 1960s top 40 radio stations, the conversion of Dreamweaver CC from a 32-bit application to a 64-bit application is the chart topper.

I have 2 reasons for ranking 64-bit Dreamweaver number 1: First, it was unexpected. Video and photo applications absolutely need the memory and computing power that a 64-bit architecture exposes. Recent additions were clearly pushing Dreamweaver to near the limitations of a 32-bit system, but I had expected it to continue on the 32-bit platform until possibly the 3rd or 4th iteration of Creative Cloud.

Second, having opened some complex Web pages using Live View, which has been enhanced in this version, it's clear how important the extra power will be to website designers.

SUPER HIT 2: Second on my hit parade, but probably first on everyone else's, is the array of mobile aps that tie to and work with desktop applications. It's enough to make me want an Iphone and and Ipad -- or (as I said earlier) at least to make me wait very impatiently until Android versions of the apps are available.

Comments by Adobe's Senior Marketing Director for Creative Cloud, Scott Morris, make clear how much faster Adobe is moving these days. The second iteration of Creative Cloud was released in June and now, in October, the company has released updated versions of every desktop application and has thorougly overhauled mobile apps that were released just months ago.

The apps, by the way, are free and they do have considerable utility even without the desktop applications. That said, it's clear that Adobe's underlying strategy is to tie all of the pieces together so that the company becomes an essential, integral part of designers' lives, no matter where those designers are and no matter what time it is.

Two new capture apps and one that has been rebranded and updated enable the ability to create brush strokes, to capture vector images from any object that can be scanned by a phone's camera, and to extract color palettes from real-world objects. Each of these captured components can be synchronized via a hub that Adobe calls your Creative Profile so that they will be available on all of your other desktop and portable devices.

Line and Draw connect to Adobe Illustrator. Sketch, Mix, and Mobile connect to Photoshop. Clip connects to Premiere. No, you can't turn your Iphone into a video editing suite, but the thought of being able to edit and cut together even a rough-cut outside of a full editing suite on a large and powerful desktop was completely unthinkable until about a week ago.

At Adobe MAX, Senior Vice President and General Manager for Digital Media, David Wadhwani, told the approximately 6000 attendees from all over the world that there is no better time to be a creative. Indeed! The possibilities are so exciting that I can't imagine any designer who would fail to be amazed after passing through this intersection of science and artistry.

SUPER HIT 3: Photoshop's new ability to "extract assets". It occurs to me that most of what I consider to be Adobe's SUPER HIT TOP FIVE deal with website design. What does Photoshop have to do with website design, you might ask. Probably more than you know unless you're a website designer.

Photoshop is arguably the most commom application used by website designers to present ideas to their clients and there's a good reason for this. Creating a Web page mock-up in Photoshop is far easier than creating it in Dreamweaver because there's no need to create CSS files and control type and component positioning. Instead, the designer just places text and graphics on a static page.

But when the client accepts the design, the person who's going to create the website had to start over. The designer would send over the Photoshop file as a "comp" and the website developer had to figure out how to convert the static illustration to a working page. Note the past tense verbs in the previous sentence. The latest version of Photoshop can export individual components from the Photoshop file (such as graphics and CSS components for color and position) that can then be imported into Dreamweaver.

This is going to save website developers a lot of time.

SUPER HIT 4: A more powerful Behance is likely to be a hit with freelance designers as well as with corporate advertising departments who are seeking a graphic artist, photographer, designer, or videographer who has a particular style and who's in a specific city and who has experience with a given subject. The talent search feature of Behance will help with that.

But Behance continues to be a place where creatives can post their work -- completed projects or work in process -- for feedback and critique from their peers. Even the best creatives can develop tunnel vision and, as a result, make a collossal blunder.

This week Drake University in Des Moines, Iowa, became the butt of jokes on Ad Week, Yahoo, Huffington Post, the Washington Post, the Des Moines Register, late-night television programs, and now on TechByter Worldwide because of its advertising message for prospective students. The campaign is branded "D+". If only the designer had allowed other creatives to see the work while it was still being developed, someone surely would have pointed out the downside of using "D+" in an advertisement for an educational institution.

SUPER HIT 5: Adobe Muse now has a "sync text" function. I reviewed Muse a few months ago and was impressed by its capabilities, but there were some significant shortcomings. Most websites have text that is repeated across pages -- addresses, phone numbers, and copyright information for example. Dreamweaver uses Library components for these kinds of items. Muse had no corresponding capability. Now it does.

Why I'm Reminded of the Late 1980s

Earlier, I described writing and estitmating the length of copy for publications in the 1980s. I almost wrote "print publications", but that's the only kind of publication we had back then. No Web. No e-books. Well, then I'd send typewritten pages to the typesetter who would re-key what I had written, correcting my typos and creating some of their own. A day or two later, I would get a galley proof, edit it for length, note the typographer's errors, and return it for another go.

A week or two later, the copy would be complete. Then I'd get out art boards, rulers, a T-square, an X-Acto knife, and a waxing machine so that I could stick the copy, headlines, and illustrations in place on the artboards.

Oh -- the illustrations. While the text was being typeset, photos had to be driven downtown so that they could be screened, cropped, and sized for printing. The size we requested was the size we got back and it was the size we used in the publication. Period.

Once all the components were on the artboards, they went to the print shop so that they could be be photographed, converted to plates, and printed.

Even a simple project would consume weeks. And color? Don't even think about it.

Then came programs such as Ventura Publisher and Aldus PageMaker. And printers that, with some special hardware, could print 1000 dpi. That was good enough to make my own gallies. They still had to be stuck to layout boards, but the schedule was reduced to less than half of what I was used to. It was so exciting.

For the past 10 years of so, it's been possible to design, create, and publish (in print or online) in hours, not days.

And Adobe dares to challenge all that by opening the door to working on photography, design, video and more -- whevever you are and whenever you want to!

Bravo!

Short Circuits

Yet Another New Leader for AMD

During the Cold War, a joke about a race between a Russian and an American went like this: The American had won the 2-person race and the supposed Soviet press account said: Soviet runner finishes second, while American runner was next to last. In the race between Intel and Advanced Micro Devices, Intel is "next to last" by a wide margin and second-place AMD continues to struggle.

In 2011, AMD appointed Rory Read to run the place. Now he has been replaced by Lisa Su, who is the company's first female CEO. Read will continue as an advisor until the end of the year. Not to sound like the old Soviet joke, but the board of directors said that Read, who was CEO for less than 3 years, had been planning for his succession and that now was the best time.

Although the company is still far smaller than Intel, Read had managed to make it profitable, in part because AMD chips are used in popular devices such as Microsoft's Xbox One and Sony's PlayStation 4.

Su came to AMD 2 years ago and, prior to being appointed CEO, was the chief operating officer. She has a doctorate in electrical engineering from MIT and had previously worked for IBM. Read had come to AMD from Lenovo.

Unsafe: Talking to Your Car

Auto manufacturers thought the hands-off systems that drivers could use by speaking to them would be less distracting than push buttons and switches. As it turns out, that is exactly wrong and Siri is the worst of the bunch. The least bad system, according to research sponsored by the American Automobile Association's Foundation for Traffic Safety, comes from Toyota.

These systems often misunderstand what the driver has said, which frustrates the driver who then stops concentrating on driving and attempts to make the voice-activated system understand. The research was conducted at the University of Utah.

Research director David Strayer explained that the systems misunderstood drivers' commands so often that some motorists swore at the devices, distracting themselves from the task at hand. Strayer characterized Siri as all but useless in cars while Toyota's Entune system and Hyundai's Blue Link system were at least "less distracting". Systems by Mercedes and General Motors were in the middle -- more distracting than listening to a book on tape, but not as bad as talking on a cell phone.

No motorists were put at risk during the study because the research was conducted using test subjects in a driving simulator. The project even gave the electronic devices an edge that they wouldn't have in a real-world situation: The test subjects wore microphones.

And on the subject of distracted driving, Volkswagen has just released a short video that clearly illustrates the problem.

Sluggish PC Market Opens Up a Bit

Manufacturers of personal computers have spent several years waiting for the market to improve. The recession hurt. Unfounded fears about Microsoft's Windows 8 hurt. The popularity of hand-held devices hurt. But I've been saying for a while that the desktop computer isn't dead and research firms IDC and Gartner released numbers this week that suggest a modest revival is approaching.

The demand dropped again this year when compared to last year's third quarter, but more slowly than expected. And because sales have been so slow for the past 3 years, many of the computers that are currently on desktops in offices and homes are beyond the age at which they should be replaced. The replacement desktop system may be a notebook computer, but it's unlikely to be a tablet. So there's still life in the market for what might be termed "real" computers.

In fact, IDC and Gartner are both suggesting that they will soon be reporting growth and Lenovo is already seeing some improvement in sales. Hewlett-Packard, which will split the the company into two companies -- one focused on servers, software and cloud technology while the other will handle the legacy computers -- has also seen improvemed sales, as has Dell.

Microsoft's end of support for Windows XP forced some businesses whose computer users had antiques on their desks to upgrade the machines. That has helped manufacturers and Windows 10, the replacement for Windows 8, is being designed to be more palatable to corporate IT managers.

IDC says 78.5 million computers were shipped worldwide in the third quarter, which is a decline of less than 2% from last year versus the predicted drop of more than 4%. In the US, the number of units shipped was 17.3 million. "Shipped" and "sold" are not the same, of course, but the correlation is usually close.

According to Gartner, Lenovo, HP, Dell, Acer, and Asus combined to sell nearly 70% of all computers, which means that smaller manufacturers are the ones suffering the most pain. It's surprising that Apple isn't listed among Gartner's top-five manufacturers. In IDC's rankings, Asus is absent and Apple is in the number five slot.

Isaacson on The Innovators

I'm reading Walter Isaacson's latest book, The Innovators, and he has introduced me to Vincent Atanasoff, one of many people who attempted, in the first half of the 1900s, to build a device that would simplify the process of complex calculations. I hadn't heard of him and, in addition to learning about his accomplishments, I was struck by two passages that are reminders of just how primitive technology was prior to the Second World War.

Isaacson: The machine was designed and hard-wired with a single purpose: solving simultaneous linear equations. It could handle up to twenty-nine variables. With each step, Atanasoff's machine would process two equations and eliminate one of the variables, then print the resulting equations on 8 x 11 binary punch cards. This set of cards with the simpler equation would then be fed back into the machine for the process to begin anew, eliminating yet another variable. The process required a bit of time. The machine would (if they could get it to work properly) take almost a week to complete a set of twenty-nine equations. Still, humans doing the same process on desk calculators would require at least ten weeks.

Me: Today the calculations Atanasoff's machine required a week to process would be completed in a second or less by even the weakest desktop computer and probably even on the average smart phone.

Isaacson: Atanasoff demonstrated a prototype at the end of 1939 and, hoping to get funding to build a full-scale machine, typed up a thirty-five-page proposal, using carbon paper to make a few copies.

Me: Xerography had been invented (1938, Chester Carlson) but wasn't patented until 1942, so if you needed another copy of a 35-page proposal in 1939, you typed another copy of the 35-page proposal.

The Innovators: How a Group of Hackers, Geniuses, and Geeks Created the Digital Revolution was released last week. Isaacson is president and CEO of the Aspen Institute, a nonpartisan educational and policy studies organization based in Washington. He has been the chairman and CEO of CNN and the managing editor of Time magazine. Isaacson's previous works include biographies of Steve Jobs, Benjamin Franklin, Albert Einstein, and Henry Kissinger.

If you're interested in the history of computing, starting with Ada Lovelace's scientific article that described Charles Babbage's Analytical Engine in the 1840s and provided the first description of a general purpose computer, this is a book for you. You may already know that Babbage and Lovelace were about 100 years ahead of their time and that what they described couldn't be successfully constructed until manufacturing and machining techniques caught up with their designs in the 1940s, but you'll meet many other people who played parts in developing the procedures and the technologies that made computers possible.