You know the types: The one who talks wayyyy too loudly on private calls, completely disrupting everyone around him. Or the self-important person whose incoming text messages are always far more important than actually giving you his undivided attention for five minutes. Yeah, those types.
If you work w/ one of those, maybe it’s time for the ultimate work-around: A cell phone jammer. Churches, temples, theaters, concert halls and museums use them to ensure that their cultural norms are preserved and so self-possessed people need to exit the locale to talk loudly or check the scores from their favorite team.
Extreme? Maybe. But sometimes that’s what’s called for.
Many of us remember when we were collectively scratching our heads around who should be able to link to whom about what – at least until Google turned it into the best possible way to monetize our online social and financial capital. But some companies are still fighting the good fight, shooting at the only target around: their feet.
Case in point; The Edinburgh Fringe Festival website. They insist that reading their site constitutes a binding contract (not true in any country I know of) and that opening up their platform to others to share, remix, and distribute would cost them significant revenue. Nevermind that most other festivals go out of their way to do just that.
There are plenty of other examples; Vodafone, Ticketmaster, Easyjet – they all prevent deep-linking. That is, the ability for others to link to webpages that are NOT the front page is forbidden.
That means that all their carefully-curated content cannot be shared. Information about their sales, their special offers, their services – all private. Not a very smart way to run a company, is it? This is 2010, and yet the hacks most of us thought had gone mainstream in 1997 still prevail in places – which is exactly why people like us need to boostrap our businesses: they aren’t going to do it themselves.
In Dubai, hundreds of thousands of laborers from all over the world are building luxury they will never experience. Some of those from India are hacking that economic divide — through cricket.
SmartLife realized that the one bond that tied both blue-collar Indian laborers, with few skills beyond what they could do with their hands, and white-collar Indian professionals, was their shared love of cricket. So SmartLife not only organized regular matches with both Indian economic classes, but they also helped establish mentoring programs where professionals “adopt” a laborer to assist in his training and development, and prizes from the cricket matches include free computer courses. (CNN Video)
Hacking Lesson: Often the best hacks involve making connections between people with seemingly different goals or agendas, and helping them see that helping each other is actually enlightened self interest. Are you a connector? Is that your hack?
Stories like this always make me sit back and wonder if I’m not screwing up the world by encouraging everyone to go out and hack stuff. After all, extensive regulation of things like nuclear reactors is a good thing, right?
And yet, when I read the details, this guy isn’t trying to make bombs, or even an existing style of reactor. He’s trying to make a fusion reactor based on the recently-unfunded work of Dr. Bussard, who showed promising signs of discovering a means of completely safe energy generation.
It’s far out, wierd, world-changing science. It’s not blowing up your backyard at all – despite what the media reporters might make of it. And it’s yet another example of useful, insightful information being inflated into sensationalist baloney.
So instead of hearing “some enterprising soul is trying to advance a promising long shot” we hear “terrorists next door.” It’s part of the reason people really DO need to embrace hacking.
Comedy Central is donating $1 to Colbert’s Gulf of America Fund (up to $50k) every time someone retweets this It’s a freaking fantastic example of how new media is chewing up old business models for breakfast.
Honestly, it’s a pretty obvious hack – just like when Colbert asked “the internet” to mess with Wikipedia’s entry on elephants. He has a big audience, and he’s able to use it. Maybe not the same way as certain other Twitterlebrities, but still – it’s clever. And after he proved his point on Wikipedia, he turned around and used it for good – by getting Comedy Central to pony up for some amazingly good branding.
In other words, he illustrated to them that if they donated a load of cash for his Gulf of America Fund they’d be associated with doing good in the mind of their (potential and existing) viewers, would reach a much larger (and better targeted) audience than if they’d just bought a billboard ad, and (I expect) got a great tax write-off to boot.
That’s a good hack. Why aren’t more folks doing this?
Some were awesome, (just don’t go to meetings); some were funny yet useful (whack a screwdriver against a magnet a few dozen times and you now have a magnetized screwdriver); some were commonsensical (buy a box of small LED flashlights and place one behind anything you routinely have to peer behind — the fridge, TV, inside a computer rack).
But one made me go “Uhhhh, I dunno.” Suggested hack: Buy a starter pistol, the kind they use in track races, and store it in your CHECKED luggage when you travel. Your luggage will ALWAYS arrive where it’s supposed to because luggage with guns in them have to be stored and managed with much more attention to detail than all other luggage. Not all procedural workarounds are good ideas!
Hacking is about solving problems, despite government or big industry’s best efforts to prevent it in the name of the status quo or market share. As in any environment, the more you attempt to suppress a balanced system the more the system will disequilibriate itself to counter you – it’s the same thing that happened with BitTorrent and music downloads, and now (increasingly) with TV and streaming.
Would somebody please tell business to wake up and start working with its consumers to give them what they want?
OK, we’re gonna use one trash-talk about one thing to make a point about something else…Let us know if it works.
In this YouTube clip, filmmaker David Lynch trashes the experience of watching a movie on your phone. No matter how good phones become, even those that start w/ “i,” we agree. People; popcorn; surroundsound; the images enveloping every part of you; experiencing the created world as the filmmaker envisioned it — that’s what we call watching a movie!
We’ll let David Lynch send you a wake-up call, in his own eloquent way, about experiencing a movie. We’d like to draw your attention to the fact that using the best tools for the best experience is always critical — whether it’s for entertainment or work. When your company produces crap project management tools, why subject yourself to that? Why not use awesome tools produced in the open-source marketplace. When your company tries to control your experience of how you build teams or how you communicate or how you perform evaluations or how you report your results with less-than-awesome (AKA: crappy) tools…why subject yourself to that?
Using the best tools for the job…(“best” as defined by “helping you do YOUR best”)…is supercritical. As Mr. Lynch might say IF he were an organizational design expert, “You’ll be cheated…It’s such a sadness…Stop using the company’s fucking tools…Get real!”
TEDster Rory Sutherland: “What [we need] is a class of people who have immense amounts of power, but no money at all.” That’s most hackers! Humorous pitch for all benevolent hackers to take over the world. It’s behavioral economics, folks: “Very small changes can have disproportionally huge effects, and vast areas of activity — [e.g.] enormous mergers — can accomplish absolutely bugger-all.” “>
Do you have a child who is in Grade 4 or 5 or higher? Here’s what they don’t tell you they’re up to in Computer Lab. This student shows everyone how to get into any site that’s blocked by your children’s school IT wizard. Poof. No more blocking!
A white hat hacker is the hero, a good guy. In purely tech-terms, these are ethical hackers who penetrate IT systems in order to better protect them. In workplace-terms, a white hat hacker is one who works around systems, tools, procedures and barriers so that the individual and his/her team can do great work, and so that the company and customers benefit also. White hat hackers are the ultimate win/win/win good guys. They save business from itself, one bad act at a time.
Colleen: One area that might be interesting to consider is how management will often block technology and enforce the Let’s Do It The Old Way mentality. Some managers are afraid that they cannot manage what they do not understand. There is a fear that management will become too dependent on a single employee with IT skills. So they turn a quick simple solution into an expensive long term project by turning it over to the “professional developers.” (This is something I live through constantly. For example: We needed to convert some data from an obscure application with an unknown database type, so I just tried every ODBC connection on my computer, after about 15 minutes I found one that worked perfectly. Yet two months later I found out management hired a consulting company to develop a special program to convert the data: it took 2 programmers 2 weeks to develop their solution.)
CHINA: “Angry migrant workers use new tools — the Internet and 787 million mobile phones”…”Every worker is a labor lawyer by himself. They know their rights better than my HR officer.” Pull quotes from a BusinessWeek article on the birth of a new labor movement in China. Whoa.
Now, kids, hacking work is kinda like marijuana’s role in the drug world. We all know that hacking one’s work is a gateway experience — a stepping stone for bigger, harder hacks. Like that 600 million workers might begin standing up for their rights.
Generate an anonymous alias that will forward to your real email address. It will automatically be deleted after either your set time or message limit has been reached. (If the link above doesn’t work, it’s cuz these guys are skating on the edge, and someone may have made them take it down.)
According to the Washington Post, “a 9-year-old McLean boy hacked into the Blackboard Learning System used by the county school system to change teachers’ and staff members’ passwords, change or delete course content, and change course enrollment. …But police and school officials decided no harm, no foul. The boy did not intend to do any serious damage, and didn’t.” Hacking continues as a way to get one’s point across: Change or we’ll help you change.
Ken: Get a USB stick and go to portableapps.com and download all kinds of software. When you plug it into your computer, it starts an alternative start menu and you can run your own programs without admin rights. Apps include open office, skype, security and compression utilities, etc. There are almost 100 apps listed on the site.
Sandy: I was listed formally as a “supervisor” in my organization, however my job had changed and I no longer supervised anyone. Last year my organization ordered that all supervisors take a one week (yes 5 full days) course dealing with OSHA safety issues. I deal with computers not chemicals, so the training would have been a waste of my time. So I had myself “demoted” so I was no longer a “supervisor,” resulting in no reduction of pay or any other type of downside. I avoided the useless training! My ego is quite happy not being called a supervisor and I got a week of my life back.
