Bits Blog: Amazon Rejected as Domain Name After South American Objections

Mauricio Lima for The New York Times A group of Latin American countries, including Brazil, Argentina, Chile, Peru and Uruguay, argued that the “.amazon” domain was too intrinsically connected to the regions and communities within their borders to allow the online retailer access to use it.

A group of Latin American countries appears to have succeeded in an effort to block Amazon, the online retailer, from using. amazon as a new suffix for Internet addresses.

A committee of the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers, an international governance group for the Internet, recommended this week that. amazon not be approved for use as a so-called global top-level domain — the letters that follow the dot in Internet addresses.

At a meeting in Durban, South Africa, Icann reviewed applications for new domain suffixes like these in what has been billed as the biggest expansion of Internet addresses. Scores of companies, countries and organizations have applied to use their names or other terms as global top-level domains, alongside the handful of existing ones like .com and .org.

While Icann has approved several new dot-terms, including the Chinese word for game and the Russian word for network, English-language brand names derived from geographical locations have proved to be more complicated.

In the run-up to the Durban meeting, a group of Latin American countries, including Brazil, Argentina, Chile, Peru and Uruguay, sent a letter to Icann, in which they argued that. amazon should be rejected because a river runs through it.

“In particular ‘. amazon’ is a geographic name that represents important territories of some of our countries, which have relevant communities, with their own culture and identity directly connected with the name,” the letter said. “Beyond the specifics, this should also be understood as a matter of principle.”

The group had also objected to another application, from the outdoor clothier Patagonia, to use its name as an address suffix. That application was withdrawn before the Durban meeting.

The decision on. amazon, by the Governmental Advisory Committee of Icann, is not necessarily final. The Icann board could overrule the committee, though in practice it rarely does so.

“We’re reviewing the G.A.C. advice and we look forward to working with Icann and other stakeholders to resolve these issues as the process moves forward,” Amazon said in a statement.

One thing that remains unclear is why the United States government, represented in the Government Advisory Committee by the National Telecommunications and Information Administration, an arm of the Commerce Department, went along with the decision.

The administration did not immediately respond to a request for comment. Before the meeting, it sent a letter to Icann in which it outlined its support for the use of names like. amazon as Internet suffixes, but added that it would stand aside if other governments objected.

“The United States affirms our support for the free flow of information and freedom of expression and does not view sovereignty as a valid basis for objecting to the use of terms, and we have concerns about the effect of such claims on the integrity of the process,” the administration said in the letter. “However, in the event the parties cannot reach agreement by the time this matter comes up for decision in the G.A.C., the United States is willing in Durban to abstain and remain neutral.”

One analyst said that while the specific reasons the United States government went along with the rejection were unclear, its position on Internet governance issues had been weakened by the recent leaks of information about a vast digital surveillance program by the National Security Agency. Several countries in South America — though not those in the Amazon basin or the Patagonian region — have offered the leaker, Edward J. Snowden, asylum.

“It is clear that the leaks of sensitive national security information have severely weakened the U.S. government’s ability to fight for our economic interests and have left the U.S. isolated in the G.A.C.,” said Nao Matsukata, chief executive of FairWinds Partners, a Washington-based consulting firm that specializes in domain name strategy.

Milton Mueller, a professor at the Syracuse University School of Information Studies, said there might have been an element of horse-trading. By yielding to a broader consensus on the advisory committee, Washington could have been seeking to shore up broader support for Icann, whose control over the Internet address system has long irked the governments of countries like Russia and China.

“My hypothesis is that the U.S. government has been scared to death for some time that if G.A.C. doesn’t get enough of what it wants, governments will give up on the whole Icann regime,” Mr. Mueller said.

Digital Domain: Apps Help Find Online Workers Quickly

These services have a drawback, however: the work is not done in real time. Workers pick up the tasks that interest them and for which they are qualified, but as independent contractors they work on their own schedules.

Computer science researchers have been trying to build systems that summon online workers on demand and produce immediate results. Much initial work has focused on completing tasks for people with disabilities, because that is where the need is great. For example, a blind person may need to identify the contents of a can from a kitchen cupboard right now, not later. A deaf college student may want to follow the give-and-take of a seminar discussion as it unfolds in the classroom, and not wait to read a transcript the next day.

VizWiz, a free iPhone app developed by Jeffrey P. Bigham of the University of Rochester and colleagues in its Human Computer Interaction program, gives real-time help to blind users.

VizWiz users take a photograph as best as they can — it may take several tries before the desired object is properly framed — and then record one question about it (“What is on the label of the can?”). Besides needing help identifying food labels, they may want to know the denomination of paper currency, say, or whether a baby’s head shows signs of a rash.

In the app’s first version, the picture and the recorded question were sent to several contractors at Mechanical Turk, to be answered for a tiny fee paid by the Rochester researchers. (More than one person can answer the same question, to ensure accuracy.) The current version offers additional options, like free “friendsourcing” of the question to the user’s Facebook friends, Twitter followers or a particular e-mail correspondent. Professor Bigham says that so far, the service has answered about 60,000 questions from 6,000 users.

FOR a typical Mechanical Turk request, it may take a few minutes, hours or days before a worker picks up the request. VizWiz helps blind users achieve real-time help by going into action as soon they alert the service that they’re preparing to take a picture. While the photograph is being shot, VizWiz posts the assignment on Mechanical Turk. If workers come online to help, but the picture isn’t yet ready, the software keeps them busy identifying archived photos. That way, they are at the ready when the real photo appears.

The crowd turns out to be a superior source of aid, compared with one’s social network, in the opinion of recently surveyed VizWiz users. As one respondent said, “When I need something identified like a can or TV dinner I am going to use it now, not whenever my friends get around to telling me what it is. :)”

Another smartphone app developed at Rochester, called Scribe, helps the deaf and hearing-impaired. With the app, users send an audio stream to many workers who provide real-time transcription. No single unskilled worker could transcribe all of the words in a live stream — only highly trained transcribers with special equipment can do that. But the software makes it possible to achieve the same results by coordinating a group of six or seven amateurs.

The software feeds the stream to each member of the crowd, but parts of it are, in effect, assigned to different people by slowing down short passages, making them easier to transcribe. Each worker transcribes the highlighted portion, and then the Scribe software stitches together the various pieces.

Computer scientists at M.I.T. have developed a “retainer model” for Turkers who need to be recruited before requests come in. Instead of keeping workers in a holding pattern with make-work, their software pays workers to remain on standby until a real request arrives on their screen.

As the researchers hone their technology and techniques, real-time help may expand to other uses. For example, an online crowd could help edit an e-mail draft, supply feedback about changes to a Web site, or do bilingual interpretation — all without delay. And researchers are now experimenting with a live video feed in VizWiz in place of individual photos.

As in most every other part of life, so it is in gaining the help of the crowd: no form of gratification beats instant.

Randall Stross is an author based in Silicon Valley and a professor of business at San Jose State University. E-mail: stross@nytimes.com.

Digital Domain: Wearable Video Cameras, for Police Officers

Now, some police departments are using miniaturized video cameras and their microphones to capture, in full detail, officers’ interactions with civilians. The cameras are so small that they can be attached to a collar, a cap or even to the side of an officer’s sunglasses. High-capacity battery packs can last for an extended shift. And all of the videos are uploaded automatically to a central server that serves as a kind of digital evidence locker.

William A. Farrar, the police chief in Rialto, Calif., has been investigating whether officers’ use of video cameras can bring measurable benefits to relations between the police and civilians. Officers in Rialto, which has a population of about 100,000, already carry Taser weapons equipped with small video cameras that activate when the weapon is armed, and the officers have long worn digital audio recorders.

But when Mr. Farrar told his uniformed patrol officers of his plans to introduce the new, wearable video cameras, “it wasn’t the easiest sell,” he said, especially to some older officers who initially were “questioning why ‘big brother’ should see everything they do.”

He said he reminded them that civilians could use their cellphones to record interactions, “so instead of relying on somebody else’s partial picture of what occurred, why not have your own?” he asked. “In this way, you have the real one.”

Last year, Mr. Farrar used the new wearable video cameras to conduct a continuing experiment in his department, in collaboration with Barak Ariel, a visiting fellow at the Institute of Criminology at the University of Cambridge an assistant professor at Hebrew University.

Half of Rialto’s uniformed patrol officers on each week’s schedule have been randomly assigned the cameras, also made by Taser International. Whenever officers wear the cameras, they are expected to activate them when they leave the patrol car to speak with a civilian.

A convenient feature of the camera is its “pre-event video buffer,” which continuously records and holds the most recent 30 seconds of video when the camera is off. In this way, the initial activity that prompts the officer to turn on the camera is more likely to be captured automatically, too.

THE Rialto study began in February 2012 and will run until this July. The results from the first 12 months are striking. Even with only half of the 54 uniformed patrol officers wearing cameras at any given time, the department over all had an 88 percent decline in the number of complaints filed against officers, compared with the 12 months before the study, to 3 from 24.

Rialto’s police officers also used force nearly 60 percent less often — in 25 instances, compared with 61. When force was used, it was twice as likely to have been applied by the officers who weren’t wearing cameras during that shift, the study found. And, lest skeptics think that the officers with cameras are selective about which encounters they record, Mr. Farrar noted that those officers who apply force while wearing a camera have always captured the incident on video.

As small as the cameras are, they seem to be noticeable to civilians, he said. “When you look at an officer,” he said, “it kind of sticks out.” Citizens have sometimes asked officers, “Hey, are you wearing a camera?” and the officers say they are, he reported.

But what about the privacy implications? Jay Stanley, a senior policy analyst at the American Civil Liberties Union, says: “We don’t like the networks of police-run video cameras that are being set up in an increasing number of cities. We don’t think the government should be watching over the population en masse.” But requiring police officers to wear video cameras is different, he says: “When it comes to the citizenry watching the government, we like that.”

Mr. Stanley says that all parties stand to benefit — the public is protected from police misconduct, and officers are protected from bogus complaints. “There are many police officers who’ve had a cloud fall over them because of an unfounded accusation of abuse,” he said. “Now police officers won’t have to worry so much about that kind of thing.”

Mr. Farrar says officers have told him of cases when citizens arrived at a Rialto police station to file a complaint and the supervisor was able to retrieve and play on the spot the video of what had transpired. “The individuals left the station with basically no other things to say and have never come back,” he said.

The A.C.L.U. does have a few concerns about possible misuse of the recordings. Mr. Stanley says civilians shouldn’t have to worry that a video will be leaked and show up on CNN. Nor would he approve of the police storing years of videos and then using them for other purposes, like trolling for crimes with which to charge civilians. He suggests policies specifying that the videos be deleted after a certain short period.

A spokesman for Taser International said it had received orders from various police departments, including those in Pittsburgh, Salt Lake City and Hartford, as well as Fort Worth, Tex.; Chesapeake, Va.; and Modesto, Calif. In the San Francisco Bay Area, the police department of BART, the transit system, has bought 210 cameras and is training its officers in their use, part of changes undertaken after a BART police officer’s fatal shooting of an unarmed man in 2009.

Before the cameras, “there were so many situations where it was ‘he said, she said,’ and juries tend to believe police officers over accused criminals,” Mr. Stanley says. “The technology really has the potential to level the playing field in any kind of controversy or allegation of abuse.”

Mr. Farrar recently completed a master’s degree in applied criminology and police management at the Universiity of Cambridge. (It required only six weeks a year of residency in England.) And he wrote about the video-camera experiment in his thesis.

He says his goal is to equip all uniformed officers in his department with the video cameras. “Video is very transparent,” he said. “It’s the whole enchilada.”

Randall Stross is an author based in Silicon Valley and a professor of business at San Jose State University. E-mail: stross@nytimes.com.

Digital Domain: Bra-Selling Web Site Uses Algorithm to Determine Fit

“It occurred to me in that fitting room, as I was waiting for that saleswoman to bring me bras: Wow, this is the worst shopping experience on earth,” she said. (My wife concurs.) From her frustration that day emerged an idea for a business called True&Co.

The history of e-commerce is marked by start-ups devising ways to sell products that were once thought of as unsuitable for sale online. Shoes were not supposed to be something customers would buy online, but then Zappos showed it could be done. The same thing was said about eyeglasses, until Warby Parker came along. But bras, which are among the most personal items someone can buy, represent the Everest of online retail challenges.

Ms. Lam’s company opened True&Co last year along with two co-founders, Dan Dolgin and Aarthi Ramamurthy. The company, based in San Francisco, is certainly not the first to sell lingerie online. Older sites include the Web arm of Victoria’s Secret and HerRoom.com, which was founded in 1998, near the dawn of the Age of E-Commerce.

Professional bra fitters have also moved online. Linda Becker, whose family owns two bra stores in New York, says she sells twice as many bras online today at LindaTheBraLady.com as she does in her stores. Some of her online customers have previously visited one of her shops and been fitted in person. But new customers take their own measurements and work with customer service representatives on the phone. She says only 10 percent of online orders are returned.

But some customers turn out to be extremely hard to fit and it’s hard to tell why, Ms. Becker says. “That kind of customer will be impossible to fit online because the problem is unseen. There’s no way of figuring it out over the phone.”

True&Co’s innovation is to put a batch of bras into customers’ hands so they can choose what fits best. New customers take a quiz — modeled on the ones in Cosmopolitan magazine that Ms. Lam fondly remembers filling out in high school — to collect the information needed to fit the bra properly. They are then invited to pick three bras in different styles.

True&Co uses an algorithm to pick two additional bras to send out, based on what can be discerned from the customer’s choices. So the customer ends up with five bras to try on at home, with no obligation to buy. Most of the company’s bras are priced from $45 to $62.

The 15-question quiz asks for the customer’s band and cup size and the manufacturer of her current “best fitting (and beloved) bra,” and works from there to determine how the fit of that favorite bra could be improved. Other quiz questions include: “Do your cups runneth over?” citing things like cleavage or underarms — or “No spills, all good.” The question “What is your shape?” is followed by these choices: Well-Rounded, Bottom Happy, Taking Sides and Bottom & Sides.

“We have an algorithm that defines 2,000 body types,” Ms. Lam said. True&Co does not make customized bras for each of those 2,000 body types, however, so much of the taxonomy’s precision is lost when it must be translated into the far fewer combinations of band and cup measurements used by bra makers.

True&Co has drawn the attention of some skeptics. Last month, a blogger at Open Source Fashion, Sindhya Valloppillil, dismissed the company’s bra-fitting algorithm as “ridiculous,” arguing that a bra must be “touched and tried on.” She mocked the credulity of True&Co’s venture capital investors in a post titled “V.C.’s Think My Boobs Need an Algorithm.”

True&Co actually makes no patently ridiculous claims about the algorithm, which involves matching a woman’s body type to a particular bra based partly on consistent variations among manufacturers for a given size and style. One manufacturer’s 32C may work better for breasts of a certain shape, for example, even if a woman is used to buying a 34B.

Customers buy an average of two bras from each batch of five. The company says women end up buying more of the bras chosen by the algorithm than the ones they select themselves.

But as with shoes and eyeglasses, so too with bras: it’s love at first touch and try, even in the digital age.

Randall Stross is an author based in Silicon Valley and a professor of business at San Jose State University. E-mail: stross@nytimes.com.

Digital Domain: Smart Parking Has a Learning Curve, Too

In its current state, however, “smart parking” is in some ways little different from regular parking. The term refers to a beguiling technology, now being tested in several cities, that uses sensors to determine whether a particular spot on the street or in a parking garage is occupied or vacant. When a car has overstayed its allotted time, the technology can also send the information to a parking enforcement officer with ticket book in hand.

The sensors’ data can also be used to adjust parking prices, using higher rates to create more turnover on the busiest blocks and lower prices to draw drivers to blocks with underused spaces.

Smart-parking technology for on-street spaces is expensive, and still in its early stages. The largest examples are pilot projects with costs covered primarily by grants from the federal Department of Transportation. In San Francisco, the SFpark pilot project uses sensors from StreetSmart Technology for 7,000 of the city’s 28,000 meters. In Los Angeles, LA Express Park has installed sensors from Streetline for 6,000 parking spots on downtown streets.

Cities are marketing the programs as experiments in using demand-based pricing to reduce traffic congestion — the kind caused by circling drivers desperately seeking parking spots — and to make more spaces available at any specific time. Drivers are encouraged to use mobile apps to check parking availability and pricing, though coverage is not universal. Parker, for example, from Streetline, gives detailed information about on-street parking for Los Angeles, but not for San Francisco.

SFpark is using “smart pricing” to achieve a target of having one parking space available most of the time in the areas it covers, says Jay Primus, the SFpark program manager. SFpark, he says, “de-emphasizes inconvenient time limits and instead uses smart pricing” to achieve those targets. The same spot, for example, may have different parking rates for different times of day. That intraday pricing is adjusted at multimonth intervals, but theoretically, it could be altered on the fly, depending on availability at any given hour.

One way to increase availability would be to use sensor technology to deter drivers from the tactic of staying parked in one place and repeatedly feeding the meter. Or a system might reset the meter automatically when a vehicle leaves a spot, so any remaining time is zeroed out. But meter resetting is “a fairly politically charged issue,” says Zia Yusuf, the C.E.O. of Streetline, and his company doesn’t provide it. (Many cities have found that midblock payment kiosks that replace individual meters solve this problem handily.)

In San Francisco, the sensor technology installed by Streetsmart Technology has been bedeviled by electromagnetic interference from overhead trolley lines. Mr. Primus says the vehicle-detection sensing is only about 90 percent accurate.

Daniel E. Mitchell, a senior transportation engineer who manages LA Express Park for the City of Los Angeles, says the accuracy of his program’s sensors has been in the mid-90 percent range, but he sees that as inadequate for automatically issuing tickets. Even if the sensors were 97 percent accurate, Mr. Mitchell says, “you’d have 3 percent of your customers experiencing a problem and that would be too many.”

Smart-parking apps aren’t as useful as might be expected for drivers seeking open spots. When a parking space is vacated, there is a short delay before a sensor’s signal moves through the wireless network, reaches the centralized system and finally arrives on a driver’s phone. But if other cars are circling, even a 30-second or one-minute wait can be too long.

As for parking enforcement, San Francisco and Los Angeles have begun to use the sensor technology to dispatch officers to cars that have stayed past their limits. That’s far more efficient that having officers roam streets in search of random meter violations.

Program officials in both cities say that they don’t yet know how many more tickets are being issued as a result of the new systems. But opportunities for “improved enforcement operations,” as a Streetline promotional video delicately refers to it, seem enormous. Mr. Yusuf says that without smart parking, “no more than 8 to 10 percent of parking payment violations are ticketed.”

AS smart parking spreads, I’ll miss the comfort of knowing that when I accidentally stay a few minutes too long in a parking spot, I may get a reprieve. After all, the enforcement officer two blocks away still has to check every meter between us before discovering my mistake.

When I shared those feelings with Mr. Yusuf, he pointed out that the technology could distinguish between those whose paid time elapsed just a few minutes previously and those who have been parked for hours. He argues that cities “want to attract more drivers to the downtown area, and it is the blatant offenders they want to target.”

Making such distinctions would be smart enforcement.

Randall Stross is an author based in Silicon Valley and a professor of business at San Jose State University. E-mail: stross@nytimes.com.

Digital Domain: Air Force Stumbles Over Software Modernization Project

For the United States Air Force, installing a new software system has certainly proved to be a wicked problem. Last month, it canceled a six-year-old modernization effort that had eaten up more than $1 billion. When the Air Force realized that it would cost another $1 billion just to achieve one-quarter of the capabilities originally planned — and that even then the system would not be fully ready before 2020 — it decided to decamp.

Silicon Valley sees its share of software projects that end unhappily. The most expensive failures, however, involve acquisitions of entire companies with software assets that turn out to be far less valuable than thought. Those can lead to stunning write-downs in the billions, as Hewlett-Packard has been forced to take recently.

But the Air Force’s software was not some mystery package, nor was it written from scratch. It was commercial off-the-shelf software, or “COTS” (the military can’t seem to resist any chance to use an acronym).

Installing COTS to run an enterprise is not a straightforward matter. The Air Force would have to make myriad adjustments to accommodate its individual needs, and in a military setting that would mean meetings and more meetings, unlike anything ever experienced in a Silicon Valley company. Still, it is hard to understand how the Defense Department blew a billion dollars before the plug was pulled.

The software initiative, called the Expeditionary Combat Support System, was supposed to manage logistics using software from Oracle. In 2006, the Air Force announced that it had awarded a $628 million contract to the Computer Sciences Corporation to serve as lead system integrator; its job would be to “configure, deploy and conduct training and change management activities” before the launch.

Four years later, in 2010, the Air Force said it had pilot programs under way at two bases. In remarks made at the time by Grover Dunn, the Air Force director of transformation, we can see just how unrealistic the project was: “We’ve never tried to change all the processes, tools and languages of all 250,000 people in our business at once, and that’s essentially what we’re about to do.”

Signs that such comprehensive change could not, in fact, be done “at once” were visible last spring. Last April, Jamie M. Morin, assistant secretary of the Air Force, testified before a subcommittee of the Senate’s Armed Services Committee about E.C.S.S.: “The total cost on the system is now over $1 billion,” he said, adding, “I am personally appalled at the limited capabilities that program has produced relative to that amount of investment.”

With the cancellation of the system last month, a spokeswoman said that the Air Force would continue to rely on its legacy logistics systems, some of which have been in use since the 1970s.

THE Defense Department says that the way the system was conceived was flawed. “We started with a Big Bang approach and put every possible requirement into the program, which made it very large and very complex,” says Elizabeth McGrath, the department’s deputy chief management officer.

E.C.S.S. was restructured many times, including three separate times in the last three years, Ms. McGrath says. “Each time, we chunked it down, breaking it into smaller pieces, focusing on specific capabilities.” But this was not enough to save the system, she says, because program managers did not succeed in imposing the short deadlines of 18 to 24 months that the department now requires for similar projects. Tight deadlines will certainly go a long way toward avoiding future billion-dollar fiascos. But much more needs to change before the department’s older software systems can be replaced.

In 2011, the nonprofit Institute for Defense Analyses, which performs independent research for the government on national security issues, issued a lengthy report on Defense Department software initiatives like E.C.S.S. It noted that modernization of the department’s software systems had been a priority for nearly 15 years, and that more than $5.8 billion had been spent through 2009 on large operational software systems, most of which were behind schedule. It recommended that the department suspend deployment of all new systems until reviews were completed.

The report cited many concerns, but the main one was a failure to meet a basic requirement for successful implementation: having “a single accountable leader” who “has the authority and willingness to exercise the authority to enforce all necessary changes to the business required for successful fielding of the software.”

I spoke last week with Paul K. Ketrick and Graeme R. Douglas, two institute researchers who were among the co-authors of the study. They said some small-scale operational systems in the Defense Department had drawn praise for successful unveilings, in the Navy and in the Defense Logistics Agency, for example.

“They got there because they had strong leadership who committed to the program and had the authority to make the changes necessary for success,” said Mr. Douglas. But “it’s rare that a single leader in the Department of Defense has the authority over the span of activities” affected by the systems, he said.

Pat Phelan, a research vice president at Gartner, the information technology research company, also calls attention to the difficult and time-consuming nature of decision-making within the department. She advocates empowering small groups to make necessary decisions, as is done in the private sector, but she does not expect the department to change. “That mind-set, that cultural shift, is not something I expect to happen in my lifetime,” she said.

The record of software modernization at the Department of Defense is discouraging. In Silicon Valley, software projects can run aground, but they don’t fail because of endless meetings and complex bureaucratic requirements, not to mention the constant need to be ready to fight wars. As Mr. Ketrick says, “Replacing the systems that run the Department of Defense is a wicked problem.”

Randall Stross is an author based in Silicon Valley and a professor of business at San Jose State University. E-mail: stross@nytimes.com.

Digital Domain: Two-Step Verification Is Inconvenient, but More Secure

In fact, though, the four-digit numbers required to use cash machines are one element of an extremely strong security model that most of today’s Web sites fall well short of matching.

Think about it: An A.T.M. requires the presentation of both a physical card and a correct PIN. Web sites can and should follow this general principle of requiring two dissimilar things before access is granted.

After supplying the password, that second thing could be a code that arrives as a text message on one’s phone. A thief would find that stealing your password for a Web site was useless without also having your phone in hand.

The technical term for requiring something you know and something you have when trying to log into an online account is “two-factor authentication.” It’s also known as two-step verification.

If this system, using passwords and smartphones, were used on all limited-access Web sites, the passwords wouldn’t have to be long and complex. But many Web users have easy-to-guess passwords in just one-step verification, which is highly imprudent.

Nick Berry, president of DataGenetics, a consulting firm in Seattle, has analyzed the large password databases that hackers who have broken into various Web sites have publicly released. Among 30.3 million passwords he has found 3.4 million consisting of nothing but four digits. (It’s astounding that there are still Web sites that permit these. I always encounter password requirements that force me to choose ever longer, more complex strings of characters, numbers and punctuation marks.)

Some four-digit passwords are far more popular than others: “1234” alone accounts for almost 11 percent of these passwords; “1111,” an additional 6 percent. Repetitive patterns occupy many of the other spots among the 20 most frequent numbers. Lower on the list are numbers that are likely to be a year of birth or the four-digit rendering of the month and day of a birthday.

We can speculate that some of the four-digit passwords found in Web sites’ databases were first conceived as PINs for A.T.M.’s. They may also be serving as the users’ PINs for unlocking smartphones. Mr. Berry says he also saw a number of instances of what he calls “finger walking” on a keypad, in which the sequence comes from a geometric pattern, like “2580” — moving from top to bottom in the keypad’s center.

The bank customer who chooses the year of her birth as her cash-machine PIN isn’t putting her savings in great jeopardy. The thief who picks up a lost wallet with an A.T.M. card in it would have to guess the PIN correctly in just the first few tries, or the system would shut down the account. Even if successful, the thief would be limited by the ceiling on daily A.T.M. withdrawals. And, in cases of theft, the customer would be made whole by the bank for the loss.

When that short PIN is used as a password on the Web, however, without a second form of verification, it is just about the worst possible choice, almost as bad as choosing “password” as one’s password. “Using an A.T.M. PIN in the context of the online world is unwise,” says Marty Jost, a product marketing manager at Symantec, the computer security company. “Using an easy-to-remember PIN is even more unwise because it’s easy to guess.”

Mr. Jost says Web sites should use multiple layers of security so that “the password is not the only authentication mechanism.”

Users of Gmail and other Google services, for example, can elect to have a two-step verification system to protect their accounts. When the system is activated, the user fills in the boxes for user name and password, as usual, but then is sent to another page where a verification code must be typed in. Users may choose to have this arrive as a text message, or they can obtain it by using an app on their smartphone. There’s a backup method, too, in case their smartphone is lost or stolen.

PayPal and Dropbox also offer their users the option of requiring two-step verification for added peace of mind. Many corporate networks have long used this security model, too.

YES, it’s a bit cumbersome. Jeff Atwood, a software developer, author, and co-founder of the programming question-and-answer site Stack Overflow, acknowledged this when he urged readers of his blog in April to use Gmail’s two-step verification option.

But, he wrote, this process “is inconvenient in the same way that bank vaults and door locks are. The upside is that once you enable this, your e-mail becomes extremely secure.”

That feeling of security originates not with a long master password, which may fall into the hands of a bad actor, but with the elegantly simple two-step verification. The designers of A.T.M.’s were on to something.

Two-step verification for Gmail or other Web services can’t work for us, however, unless we set it up. And there’s no better time than the present to do so. “Not tomorrow. Not next week,” Mr. Atwood wrote. Now.

Randall Stross, a professor of business at San Jose State University, is the author of “The Launch Pad,” published last month.

Digital Domain: Flightfox Lets the Crowd Find the Best Airfares

Travelers with complex travel plans may have noticed, however, that the search results aren’t necessarily consistent. This has created a business opportunity for Flightfox, a start-up company based in Mountain View, Calif., which uses a contest format to come up with the best fare that the crowd — all Flightfox-approved users — can find.

A traveler goes to Flightfox.com and sets up a competition, supplying information about the desired itinerary and clarifying a few preferences, like a willingness to “fly on any airline to save money” or a tolerance of “long layovers to save money.” Once Flightfox posts the contest, the crowd is invited to go to work and submit fares.

The contest runs three days, and the winner, the person who finds the lowest fare, gets 75 percent of the finder’s fee that the traveler pays Flightfox when setting up the competition. Flightfox says fees depend on the complexity of the itinerary; many current contests have fees in the $34-to-$59 range.

Travelers’ savings can be considerable. In a contest for a long, complex trip that began in Sydney, passed through Barcelona and then many South American destinations before returning to Sydney, the difference between the lowest fare, $6,538 a person, and the third-lowest was about $1,400. Why couldn’t every human searcher find the same fare that the winner did? The fact that the travelers specified 15 destinations for their four-month-long trip meant that no single search engine had all the needed information.

Flightfox asks travelers who have already found a good fare on their own to make clear at the outset that they will award the finder’s fee only if a better price is found. The site also encourages travelers to consider awarding a finder’s fee for flights that may not be less expensive but have fewer stops or shorter layovers.

Human searchers can find flights that handle special requests, like traveling with a pet or a surfboard, to which a travel search engine remains oblivious. Todd Sullivan, a software developer and co-founder of Flightfox, says, “There are too many variables for it to be economically feasible to build an algorithm that covers every aspect of travel.”

Mr. Sullivan says the company has about 900 researchers, which it calls “experts,” who search fares on behalf of the sponsoring travelers. Anyone can apply to be an “expert”; Mr. Sullivan says applicants need only show evidence of the ability to find good fares.

About 20 percent of the Flightfox researchers are travel agents. Another large group are what Mr. Sullivan calls “flight hackers,” people who enjoy the sport of fare-hunting and frequent sites like FlyerTalk. “They do this at sites like this for free anyhow,” Mr. Sullivan says. “We’ve commercialized it.”

The other large group of researchers comprises frequent travelers seeking ways to make money to finance their travel. Mr. Sullivan says he and his co-founder, Lauren McLeod, were in this category when they started the company early this year.

The two say they have raised $800,000 in seed funding from Silicon Valley and Australian investors.

One of Flightfox’s experts is Michael Roizman, a medical student at the University of Queensland in Australia, who has not done a lot of traveling himself. Nonetheless, he won a contest that Flightfox set up for fun, challenging searchers to find the lowest possible fare for an itinerary that would begin and end in a North American city and would touch all other continents except Antarctica. Mr. Roizman’s winning fare was $1,730 for a trip that included stops in Guyana, Morocco, Istanbul, Kuala Lumpur and Perth, Australia.

“A flight search engine is blind to the opportunity to break up a complex itinerary into separate segments that originate in low-fare markets,” Mr. Roizman says.

He gives an example of a flight from Sydney to Germany. It’s much cheaper, he says, to start with an inexpensive flight from Sydney to Southeast Asia, then fly on to Germany on any of several low-fare carriers.

The contest for the 15-destination trip from Sydney was won by Monique Krestyn, a Flightfox expert in Massachusetts whose days are mostly filled with looking after five young children. “I have a cousin who is a computer geek,” she says, “and he once said that the only thing I could do better on a computer than him is find good flights.” He ran across an ad for Flightfox and brought it to her attention.

Ms. Krestyn recalls, “At first, I thought, ‘Where in the world are these experts finding these fares?’” It took about a week, she says, to become familiar with smaller airlines that don’t show up in travel search engines. She also discovered that fares “are priced differently depending on where you look — and where you are looking from.”

In that contest, she made $100, but more typically the winnings are $20 or $30. “It doesn’t sound like much, but it really does add up,” she says. “In three months, I’ve made $4,000 and that’s just utilizing my downtime when home and family aren’t demanding me.”

It’s most heartening to see that in the domain of travel planning, humans still manage to hold their own. Every contest concluded at Flightfox is a small win for the species.

Randall Stross, a professor of business at San Jose State University, is the author of “The Launch Pad,” published this month.

Digital Domain: Smartphone Ads and Their Drawbacks — Digital Domain

That’s one reason smartphones are not working well as a medium for many advertisers. The evidence is telling: advertisers are willing to pay much more to reach a thousand pairs of eyes gazing upon a computer or tablet than a thousand pairs looking at a smartphone screen.

“Size absolutely does matter,” says Christine Chen, director of communication strategy at Goodby Silverstein & Partners, an ad agency in San Francisco. “If you look at the real estate available on a smartphone, it’s really sad compared to not just banner ads on the Web, but also to TV, print and outdoor advertising.”

Size isn’t the only problem. Advertisers are also limited by what they can find out about smartphone users. It’s not technically possible to use cookies with smartphone apps the way it is with a browser. On the Web, publishers typically record users’ actions so that advertisers can make an educated guess about a user’s identity and interests.

“What makes Web ads so attractive to advertisers is the ability to track actions and optimize accordingly,” Ms. Chen says. Because a smartphone cannot use the same technology, she says, “your ability to track and optimize is much more blunt, or in some cases nonexistent.”

These limitations depress demand for smartphone ads and lead to low prices. A banner ad on a Web page that costs $3 to $5 for every thousand impressions may cost only 75 cents or $1 for a thousand impressions on a smartphone, Ms. Chen says.

Another reason advertisers don’t value smartphone ads highly is that users tend to lack a receptive mind-set when using their phones. “It’s an activity you do for a short burst of time,” Ms. Chen says. “It’s very functional.” That is not a good time to try to make users stop what they are doing and give their attention to an advertiser’s message.

Ms. Chen says she tells her firm’s clients not to bother advertising on smartphones.

Jeff Lanctot, global chief media officer at Razorfish, says context is much more important on smartphones than on larger devices. “Requesting a marketing-related action while looking at wedding photos would be considered intrusive,” he says, “but while playing a game, it might feel very natural.”

Mark Himmelsbach, director of digital strategy at BBDO North America, sees some potential uses for cell phones as an advertising medium, but he says most marketers take care to limit the size of ads on phones “so as not to irritate people.”

“Mobile ads are relegated to a tiny portion of the screen and are often invisible or ignored by consumers,” Mr. Himmelsbach says.

Phones do have some benefits, like the ability to serve up ads based on location or to integrate advertising into apps that are used for something else, he says. But of all the possible options, he says, “mobile display ads give us the least amount of creative opportunity.”

Location-based mobile advertising, known as geofencing, is directed only at nearby prospects, and it has proved to work well, says Doug Ray, president of Carat North America, a media planning and buying firm. “Knowing where you are geographically and delivering a contextually relevant offer has been effective in driving conversions and sales,” he says. “Geofencing is not possible with a desktop PC.”

Consumers, however, don’t necessarily want to be reminded that their phones are location-tracking devices for advertisers. “A mobile device is one of the most personal forms of technology we have,” Ms. Chen says. Location tracking is perfectly legal but apps ask users’ permission during installation.

Using the Web on a desktop, laptop, or even a tablet, isn’t likely to feel as tightly bound to our personal selves. Much Web content is mass media, broad in reach, and that’s good for the advertising business because users do not treat the accompanying ads as an intrusion into their personal space.

“Media consumption is less personal than, say, a Facebook page, a text message or a phone conversation,” says Mr. Lanctot of Razorfish, “and so historically is better suited to be ad-supported.”

MR. LANCTOT mentions three companies that are doing well with mobile advertising: Pandora, Twitter and Foursquare. But each of these is fortunate to be in a business where it doesn’t have to contend with “banner blindness” among users.

Pandora inserts audio commercials into its music stream, Twitter puts sponsored ads into tweet streams and Foursquare lets advertisers try out geofencing.

“The advertising on all three is a very natural part of the user experience,” Mr. Lanctot says. “It’s not intrusive.”

What doesn’t make his list is the smartphone’s minuscule display ad. Digital advertisers working with smartphones must somehow make their ads large enough to be noticed, but not so large as to be an interruption. And they must be chosen to match a user’s interests, but not so closely as to induce a shiver.

Randall Stross is an author based in Silicon Valley and a professor of business at San Jose State University. E-mail: stross@nytimes.com.

Digital Domain: Farm Software Tries to Make Its Mark - Digital Domain

FarmLogs, a start-up based in Ann Arbor, Mich., is a one of a few new companies that are making a pitch to farmers. It offers a cloud-based software service — no software is downloaded; only a Web browser is needed — that embodies the latest technology. But in reaching its intended customers, the company must often rely on an old-fashioned medium: in-person selling.

Jesse Vollmar, 23, and Brad Koch, 22, graduated from Saginaw Valley State University last year and were running their own small I.T. consulting company when they decided to try to make easy-to-use software for farms like the one on which Mr. Vollmar grew up in Caro, Mich., about 90 miles northwest of Detroit.

The two received funding from Y Combinator, a seed fund in Mountain View, Calif. During a three-month residency in Silicon Valley last winter, under Y Combinator’s aegis, they worked on farm management software aimed at tracking all of a farmer’s field activities. In one view, a farmer can see rectangular representations of what is planted on each field. A click leads to a log of what was done when on each field: tilling on this date, fertilizing on that date, spraying on another.

With the data stored in one place, it can be combined with information from other sources and used by the farmers. If they need, they can also share it easily with consulting agronomists, crop insurance agents, the Agriculture Department and others.

Nathan Engelhard, an early customer who farms 1,000 acres in Unionville, Mich., says FarmLogs gives him the ability to take his iPad out into the field and make entries himself. “FarmLogs is a money saver,” he says, “because I don’t have to write things down on a scrap of paper and pay someone to sit in an office and enter them into the computer.”

FarmLogs officially opened to customers in June. “We’re trying to reach a community that isn’t all online yet,” Mr. Vollmar says. “We have to use more traditional marketing methods.” FarmLogs declined to say how many people have signed up.

In mid-July, Mr. Vollmar set up a booth at a local county fair. (In the booth to the left was a political candidate; to the right, a psychic.) Farmers who stopped by were receptive, and many signed up for the service, he says. But the local fair drew too few attendees.

FarmLogs reached many more prospects by demonstrating its service at a booth at the much larger Ag Expo at Michigan State University. This annual agricultural trade show drew more than 18,000 visitors last month.

FARMLOGS has spent little on advertising. Print magazines about farming are often found in rural homes, but the company has not yet tested the efficacy of print ads, which Mr. Vollmar says are costly. Instead, experiments with Google ads have produced encouraging results, especially when tied to a search for the phrase “farm management software.”

In a niche like this, the pre-cloud method of software distribution, entailing downloading and installing software on a desktop PC, imposes high initial costs for the customer, but no monthly fees. One of FarmLogs’ older competitors, Farm Works Software, for example, sells accounting software for a desktop PC that is designed for farmers and costs $750.

FarmLogs, however, uses the pricing format of software-as-a-service start-up: a free trial, no setup fees, and monthly plans based on the size of operations. Costs range from $9 a month for the smallest farm to $99 a month for farms of more than 2,000 acres.

Farmers’ income arrives unevenly, in big lumps over the course of a year rather than in a steady monthly stream. That could make it hard to persuade farmers who are now using notebooks or spreadsheets for record-keeping to add a new and recurring expense category, software-as-a-service, even if the amount is tiny when compared with annual income.

Another start-up, Farmeron, also provides a cloud-based software service for farm management. It has received funding from 500 Startups, another seed fund based in Mountain View.

But where FarmLogs is for row crops, Farmeron is focused on livestock management. Its monthly charge depends on the number of animals managed by the farm, and by the number of people who use the software. Typically, of the many people who may work on a farm, two or more may need simultaneous access to the same data, which a cloud-based service easily provides.

The mission of another start-up, Solum, is to expand the store of data that farmers use to make decisions. The company has a central office in Mountain View and a soil analysis laboratory in Ames, Iowa.

Founded by three young men who earned Ph.D.’s in applied physics from Stanford, Solum has created new hardware and software technology for soil analysis. It makes a machine for testing soil nitrate levels that is small enough to be kept on the farm, allowing farmers to perform far more tests cost-effectively in a given field, says Nick Koshnick, one of the founders.

“It turns out that there’s huge variability in yield across a field,” Mr. Koshnick says, “The challenge is to figure out what accounts for the variability. Our soil analysis can be used with GPS mapping to help agronomists figure out what fertilizer to put where.”

In essence, Solum and other start-ups are building the technology to allow farmers to benefit from data science.

Solum has raised more than $19 million from investors including the Silicon Valley venture capital firms Khosla Ventures and Andreessen Horowitz.

Had it been around in his day, George Washington might have been quite excited to see a demonstration of Solum’s testing technology. At Mount Vernon, Washington experimented with using muck dredged from the Potomac River as a fertilizer — he would toast, “Success to the mud!” But his method, alas, was hit-or-miss. No GPS, databases or algorithms, and no software-as-a-service at any price.

Randall Stross is an author based in Silicon Valley and a professor of business at San Jose State University. E-mail: stross@nytimes.com.

Digital Domain: Farm Software Tries to Make Its Mark - Digital Domain

FarmLogs, a start-up based in Ann Arbor, Mich., is a one of a few new companies that are making a pitch to farmers. It offers a cloud-based software service — no software is downloaded; only a Web browser is needed — that embodies the latest technology. But in reaching its intended customers, the company must often rely on an old-fashioned medium: in-person selling.

Jesse Vollmar, 23, and Brad Koch, 22, graduated from Saginaw Valley State University last year and were running their own small I.T. consulting company when they decided to try to make easy-to-use software for farms like the one on which Mr. Vollmar grew up in Caro, Mich., about 90 miles northwest of Detroit.

The two received funding from Y Combinator, a seed fund in Mountain View, Calif. During a three-month residency in Silicon Valley last winter, under Y Combinator’s aegis, they worked on farm management software aimed at tracking all of a farmer’s field activities. In one view, a farmer can see rectangular representations of what is planted on each field. A click leads to a log of what was done when on each field: tilling on this date, fertilizing on that date, spraying on another.

With the data stored in one place, it can be combined with information from other sources and used by the farmers. If they need, they can also share it easily with consulting agronomists, crop insurance agents, the Agriculture Department and others.

Nathan Engelhard, an early customer who farms 1,000 acres in Unionville, Mich., says FarmLogs gives him the ability to take his iPad out into the field and make entries himself. “FarmLogs is a money saver,” he says, “because I don’t have to write things down on a scrap of paper and pay someone to sit in an office and enter them into the computer.”

FarmLogs officially opened to customers in June. “We’re trying to reach a community that isn’t all online yet,” Mr. Vollmar says. “We have to use more traditional marketing methods.” FarmLogs declined to say how many people have signed up.

In mid-July, Mr. Vollmar set up a booth at a local county fair. (In the booth to the left was a political candidate; to the right, a psychic.) Farmers who stopped by were receptive, and many signed up for the service, he says. But the local fair drew too few attendees.

FarmLogs reached many more prospects by demonstrating its service at a booth at the much larger Ag Expo at Michigan State University. This annual agricultural trade show drew more than 18,000 visitors last month.

FARMLOGS has spent little on advertising. Print magazines about farming are often found in rural homes, but the company has not yet tested the efficacy of print ads, which Mr. Vollmar says are costly. Instead, experiments with Google ads have produced encouraging results, especially when tied to a search for the phrase “farm management software.”

In a niche like this, the pre-cloud method of software distribution, entailing downloading and installing software on a desktop PC, imposes high initial costs for the customer, but no monthly fees. One of FarmLogs’ older competitors, Farm Works Software, for example, sells accounting software for a desktop PC that is designed for farmers and costs $750.

FarmLogs, however, uses the pricing format of software-as-a-service start-up: a free trial, no setup fees, and monthly plans based on the size of operations. Costs range from $9 a month for the smallest farm to $99 a month for farms of more than 2,000 acres.

Farmers’ income arrives unevenly, in big lumps over the course of a year rather than in a steady monthly stream. That could make it hard to persuade farmers who are now using notebooks or spreadsheets for record-keeping to add a new and recurring expense category, software-as-a-service, even if the amount is tiny when compared with annual income.

Another start-up, Farmeron, also provides a cloud-based software service for farm management. It has received funding from 500 Startups, another seed fund based in Mountain View.

But where FarmLogs is for row crops, Farmeron is focused on livestock management. Its monthly charge depends on the number of animals managed by the farm, and by the number of people who use the software. Typically, of the many people who may work on a farm, two or more may need simultaneous access to the same data, which a cloud-based service easily provides.

The mission of another start-up, Solum, is to expand the store of data that farmers use to make decisions. The company has a central office in Mountain View and a soil analysis laboratory in Ames, Iowa.

Founded by three young men who earned Ph.D.’s in applied physics from Stanford, Solum has created new hardware and software technology for soil analysis. It makes a machine for testing soil nitrate levels that is small enough to be kept on the farm, allowing farmers to perform far more tests cost-effectively in a given field, says Nick Koshnick, one of the founders.

“It turns out that there’s huge variability in yield across a field,” Mr. Koshnick says, “The challenge is to figure out what accounts for the variability. Our soil analysis can be used with GPS mapping to help agronomists figure out what fertilizer to put where.”

In essence, Solum and other start-ups are building the technology to allow farmers to benefit from data science.

Solum has raised more than $19 million from investors including the Silicon Valley venture capital firms Khosla Ventures and Andreessen Horowitz.

Had it been around in his day, George Washington might have been quite excited to see a demonstration of Solum’s testing technology. At Mount Vernon, Washington experimented with using muck dredged from the Potomac River as a fertilizer — he would toast, “Success to the mud!” But his method, alas, was hit-or-miss. No GPS, databases or algorithms, and no software-as-a-service at any price.

Randall Stross is an author based in Silicon Valley and a professor of business at San Jose State University. E-mail: stross@nytimes.com.

Digital Domain: Cellphone Cases Can Imitate Their Makers - Digital Domain

Some devices, like my Android phone, a Galaxy Nexus by Samsung, have a back cover that slides off and a battery that pops out. And when evaluators at iFixit, a Web site offering do-it-yourself repair manuals and parts, disassembled Google’s new Nexus 7 tablet for a “teardown” review, they found that it was easy to open and repair.

In iFixit’s video review, the narrator describes how the battery can be replaced without unscrewing a single screw. She is moved to declare, “The sustainability-geek inside me wants to hug Google for this.”

Other vendors — Apple, would you please take a bow? — make products that are designed to keep users out. The case on my wife’s iPhone 4 is closed with screws of Apple’s own devising that require a special screwdriver.

IFixit offers a tool kit for replacing those screws with standard ones. It mischievously markets this as a “Liberation Kit.”

It isn’t surprising that Apple, the epitome of the closed organization and overlord of the iPhone’s tightly controlled software ecosystem, would design screws that, in effect, serve as locks. And one can see how it would be in Apple’s interest to make it hard for users to extend the life of older models — it’s a way to encourage the purchase of the newest, greatest Apple stuff.

Google, which until now has not done much in consumer electronics hardware with its own brand name, is positioning itself as a conspicuous alternative to Apple, in design as in other aspects. As long as Apple embraces closed systems — and closed cases — Google can take advantage of an opportunity to be the un-Apple and to open up.

Using components that are easy to recycle is one way to score points for selling an environmentally friendly product. Apple’s products rank high in that regard, says Kyle Wiens, co-founder of iFixit. But Apple doesn’t want its users to service its devices, he says. So it scores lower in another important aspect of being “green”: extending a product’s useful life by making it easy to repair.

An Apple spokesman declined to comment.

In January, Sprint announced a “sustainable design” effort, in partnership with the environmental unit of UL, the independent testing and certification group. Sprint encourages all of its partner manufacturers to submit their handsets for evaluation of the “repairability and recyclability” of the devices. Those that attain a certain number of points will be designated as “certified” or, greenest of all, “platinum.”

Lois Fagan, Sprint director of product development, says, “We have a self-imposed goal that at least 50 percent of our portfolio of new phones in 2012 will be certified.”

Consumers who want to know which phones are the easiest to repair won’t get much guidance from UL Environment. It will say only whether a device has earned its “certified” or “platinum” designations. It does not say what points were earned for any particular criterion, like ease of removing the external enclosure or the battery, or availability of replacement parts. Nor does it disclose which handsets fail to earn enough points to be certified.

The ability to remove the battery is especially important to frequent phone users, because the original battery may not last the two-year commitment required in a standard contract.

Apple says its iPhone battery is designed to retain up to 80 percent of its original capacity after 400 full charge and discharge cycles. For phones out of warranty, it offers a battery replacement service for $79 if you send the phone to its repair center; shipping costs are extra. (Being without one’s phone is an inconvenience not reflected in the price.)

IFixit provides an alternative. It sells replacement batteries and the necessary tools and offers its free online repair manuals, prepared by fellow users. A replacement battery for the older iPhone 3G model is only $14.95, and there’s no painful parting with the phone in the process.

According to Mr. Wiens, iPhone batteries aren’t hard to replace, with the right screwdriver, available online. “Under five minutes; no technical skills required,” he says.

Even replacing the glass on an iPad 3 can be done by amateurs, he contends, but guidance is needed: “I have a pile of iPad 3s that we broke while trying to learn how to repair them. Last week we finally broke the code.”

IFixit offers manuals covering computers, cameras, game consoles and household appliances, too; its credo is “repair is recycling.”

Hooman Morvarid, president of

CellularDR.com, a repair business that handles phones from many manufacturers, says the most frequent problem he sees is broken glass, followed by a broken LCD screen that sits behind the glass. Increasingly, he says, the glass and LCD are fused together in a way that makes them impossible to separate if one or the other is broken. “So phones are actually becoming more expensive to repair,” he says.

The more that designers of mobile devices avoid fusing parts together, the easier they are to repair. And the repairs most likely to be undertaken are those we can do ourselves.

Randall Stross is an author based in Silicon Valley and a professor of business at San Jose State University. E-mail: stross@nytimes.com.

Digital Domain: Cellphone Cases Can Imitate Their Makers - Digital Domain

Some devices, like my Android phone, a Galaxy Nexus by Samsung, have a back cover that slides off and a battery that pops out. And when evaluators at iFixit, a Web site offering do-it-yourself repair manuals and parts, disassembled Google’s new Nexus 7 tablet for a “teardown” review, they found that it was easy to open and repair.

In iFixit’s video review, the narrator describes how the battery can be replaced without unscrewing a single screw. She is moved to declare, “The sustainability-geek inside me wants to hug Google for this.”

Other vendors — Apple, would you please take a bow? — make products that are designed to keep users out. The case on my wife’s iPhone 4 is closed with screws of Apple’s own devising that require a special screwdriver.

IFixit offers a tool kit for replacing those screws with standard ones. It mischievously markets this as a “Liberation Kit.”

It isn’t surprising that Apple, the epitome of the closed organization and overlord of the iPhone’s tightly controlled software ecosystem, would design screws that, in effect, serve as locks. And one can see how it would be in Apple’s interest to make it hard for users to extend the life of older models — it’s a way to encourage the purchase of the newest, greatest Apple stuff.

Google, which until now has not done much in consumer electronics hardware with its own brand name, is positioning itself as a conspicuous alternative to Apple, in design as in other aspects. As long as Apple embraces closed systems — and closed cases — Google can take advantage of an opportunity to be the un-Apple and to open up.

Using components that are easy to recycle is one way to score points for selling an environmentally friendly product. Apple’s products rank high in that regard, says Kyle Wiens, co-founder of iFixit. But Apple doesn’t want its users to service its devices, he says. So it scores lower in another important aspect of being “green”: extending a product’s useful life by making it easy to repair.

An Apple spokesman declined to comment.

In January, Sprint announced a “sustainable design” effort, in partnership with the environmental unit of UL, the independent testing and certification group. Sprint encourages all of its partner manufacturers to submit their handsets for evaluation of the “repairability and recyclability” of the devices. Those that attain a certain number of points will be designated as “certified” or, greenest of all, “platinum.”

Lois Fagan, Sprint director of product development, says, “We have a self-imposed goal that at least 50 percent of our portfolio of new phones in 2012 will be certified.”

Consumers who want to know which phones are the easiest to repair won’t get much guidance from UL Environment. It will say only whether a device has earned its “certified” or “platinum” designations. It does not say what points were earned for any particular criterion, like ease of removing the external enclosure or the battery, or availability of replacement parts. Nor does it disclose which handsets fail to earn enough points to be certified.

The ability to remove the battery is especially important to frequent phone users, because the original battery may not last the two-year commitment required in a standard contract.

Apple says its iPhone battery is designed to retain up to 80 percent of its original capacity after 400 full charge and discharge cycles. For phones out of warranty, it offers a battery replacement service for $79 if you send the phone to its repair center; shipping costs are extra. (Being without one’s phone is an inconvenience not reflected in the price.)

IFixit provides an alternative. It sells replacement batteries and the necessary tools and offers its free online repair manuals, prepared by fellow users. A replacement battery for the older iPhone 3G model is only $14.95, and there’s no painful parting with the phone in the process.

According to Mr. Wiens, iPhone batteries aren’t hard to replace, with the right screwdriver, available online. “Under five minutes; no technical skills required,” he says.

Even replacing the glass on an iPad 3 can be done by amateurs, he contends, but guidance is needed: “I have a pile of iPad 3s that we broke while trying to learn how to repair them. Last week we finally broke the code.”

IFixit offers manuals covering computers, cameras, game consoles and household appliances, too; its credo is “repair is recycling.”

Hooman Morvarid, president of

CellularDR.com, a repair business that handles phones from many manufacturers, says the most frequent problem he sees is broken glass, followed by a broken LCD screen that sits behind the glass. Increasingly, he says, the glass and LCD are fused together in a way that makes them impossible to separate if one or the other is broken. “So phones are actually becoming more expensive to repair,” he says.

The more that designers of mobile devices avoid fusing parts together, the easier they are to repair. And the repairs most likely to be undertaken are those we can do ourselves.

Randall Stross is an author based in Silicon Valley and a professor of business at San Jose State University. E-mail: stross@nytimes.com.

Digital Domain: Cellphone Cases Can Imitate Their Makers - Digital Domain

Some devices, like my Android phone, a Galaxy Nexus by Samsung, have a back cover that slides off and a battery that pops out. And when evaluators at iFixit, a Web site offering do-it-yourself repair manuals and parts, disassembled Google’s new Nexus 7 tablet for a “teardown” review, they found that it was easy to open and repair.

In iFixit’s video review, the narrator describes how the battery can be replaced without unscrewing a single screw. She is moved to declare, “The sustainability-geek inside me wants to hug Google for this.”

Other vendors — Apple, would you please take a bow? — make products that are designed to keep users out. The case on my wife’s iPhone 4 is closed with screws of Apple’s own devising that require a special screwdriver.

IFixit offers a tool kit for replacing those screws with standard ones. It mischievously markets this as a “Liberation Kit.”

It isn’t surprising that Apple, the epitome of the closed organization and overlord of the iPhone’s tightly controlled software ecosystem, would design screws that, in effect, serve as locks. And one can see how it would be in Apple’s interest to make it hard for users to extend the life of older models — it’s a way to encourage the purchase of the newest, greatest Apple stuff.

Google, which until now has not done much in consumer electronics hardware with its own brand name, is positioning itself as a conspicuous alternative to Apple, in design as in other aspects. As long as Apple embraces closed systems — and closed cases — Google can take advantage of an opportunity to be the un-Apple and to open up.

Using components that are easy to recycle is one way to score points for selling an environmentally friendly product. Apple’s products rank high in that regard, says Kyle Wiens, co-founder of iFixit. But Apple doesn’t want its users to service its devices, he says. So it scores lower in another important aspect of being “green”: extending a product’s useful life by making it easy to repair.

An Apple spokesman declined to comment.

In January, Sprint announced a “sustainable design” effort, in partnership with the environmental unit of UL, the independent testing and certification group. Sprint encourages all of its partner manufacturers to submit their handsets for evaluation of the “repairability and recyclability” of the devices. Those that attain a certain number of points will be designated as “certified” or, greenest of all, “platinum.”

Lois Fagan, Sprint director of product development, says, “We have a self-imposed goal that at least 50 percent of our portfolio of new phones in 2012 will be certified.”

Consumers who want to know which phones are the easiest to repair won’t get much guidance from UL Environment. It will say only whether a device has earned its “certified” or “platinum” designations. It does not say what points were earned for any particular criterion, like ease of removing the external enclosure or the battery, or availability of replacement parts. Nor does it disclose which handsets fail to earn enough points to be certified.

The ability to remove the battery is especially important to frequent phone users, because the original battery may not last the two-year commitment required in a standard contract.

Apple says its iPhone battery is designed to retain up to 80 percent of its original capacity after 400 full charge and discharge cycles. For phones out of warranty, it offers a battery replacement service for $79 if you send the phone to its repair center; shipping costs are extra. (Being without one’s phone is an inconvenience not reflected in the price.)

IFixit provides an alternative. It sells replacement batteries and the necessary tools and offers its free online repair manuals, prepared by fellow users. A replacement battery for the older iPhone 3G model is only $14.95, and there’s no painful parting with the phone in the process.

According to Mr. Wiens, iPhone batteries aren’t hard to replace, with the right screwdriver, available online. “Under five minutes; no technical skills required,” he says.

Even replacing the glass on an iPad 3 can be done by amateurs, he contends, but guidance is needed: “I have a pile of iPad 3s that we broke while trying to learn how to repair them. Last week we finally broke the code.”

IFixit offers manuals covering computers, cameras, game consoles and household appliances, too; its credo is “repair is recycling.”

Hooman Morvarid, president of

CellularDR.com, a repair business that handles phones from many manufacturers, says the most frequent problem he sees is broken glass, followed by a broken LCD screen that sits behind the glass. Increasingly, he says, the glass and LCD are fused together in a way that makes them impossible to separate if one or the other is broken. “So phones are actually becoming more expensive to repair,” he says.

The more that designers of mobile devices avoid fusing parts together, the easier they are to repair. And the repairs most likely to be undertaken are those we can do ourselves.

Randall Stross is an author based in Silicon Valley and a professor of business at San Jose State University. E-mail: stross@nytimes.com.

Digital Domain: Movie Screens, Small to Big to Small Again - Digital Domain

The earliest motion-picture viewing was a solitary experience. One looked through a peephole at the top of a Kinetoscope, a waist-high cabinet in which a light illuminated the frames of a continuous film loop. A magnifying lens was attached to the peephole, but the images remained tiny. That means the first cinematographers didn’t have much to work with.

When projection arrived, movie images could be made life-size in a theater, then larger than life, on a big screen accompanied by big sound. Taking in a movie became not just an immersive experience, but also a social one, with members of the audience sitting in the dark together, laughing, crying and shrieking.

Today, we’ve reached the acme of technical sophistication — and have come nearly full circle. Movie watching is, again, a solitary experience, involving small images on a laptop, a tablet and, tinier still, a cellphone. The convenience is wonderful, of course, but it comes at a price: the loss of the immersive cinematic experience.

Americans will pay to watch 3.4 billion movies online this year, IHS Screen Digest estimates. That’s much more than double the number for 2010.

It’s impossible to say exactly how many of those movies will be viewed on which portable devices. A spokesman for Netflix, the leader in streaming older movie titles, declined to share details about streaming device destinations.

We do know that the newest movie titles, including the most visually spectacular, are available through Apple or Google for inexpensive rental on the small screen. (Apple made movie rentals available for phones starting in 2008, and Netflix introduced a smartphone app in 2010). Cellphone owners can rent “Hugo,” the 2012 Academy Award winner for cinematography, for $3.99 and watch it on a screen whose size is not much larger than the image seen through the Kinetoscope’s peephole.

When an online movie is viewed at home on a giant flat screen and heard through an expensive sound system, the sensory experience surely exceeds what might be had at a rundown multiplex on a bad day. But movies viewed on mobile devices aren’t going to give the brain’s sensorium much stimulation.

“It’s a sensual experience when you go to a theater, if there’s sharp projection and six-track sound,” says John Belton, a professor of English and film at Rutgers University. “That is a very different experience than watching on an iPad” or on other portable devices.

Professor Belton points out that the first projected images in theaters were not all that large. In a movie palace that might hold 5,000 people, an early screen might have been only 15 feet wide. But the images became larger around the time that sound arrived in the 1930s.

Then, in the 1950s, as Hollywood found itself competing against television, it used special lenses to create movies for screens of expanded width. Marilyn Monroe’s body, in languorous repose, would stretch across screens as wide as 64 feet. This was an intentional shift, Professor Belton says, to “an image that overwhelms the spectator,” part of Hollywood’s campaign “to show the limitations of television.” Later, Hollywood reversed course and began selling to television, though that meant cropping its wide-screen pictures so they would fit on a small screen.

The most glorious attempt to fully engage the theater spectator’s senses was Cinerama, introduced in 1952. Filmed with three cameras outfitted with wide-angle lenses, it used three wide screens, put together in a sumptuous near-semicircle of 146 degrees.

“This gives you a ‘first-person’ experience,” says Thomas Hauerslev, editor of the Web site In70mm. “You see what you’d see if you were sitting where the camera is.” He says IMAX “is not a first-person experience — it’s just big.”

Each frame in Cinerama is 50 percent taller than a regular frame, providing more detail. This makes the cinematic illusion “extremely realistic,” Mr. Hauerslev says.

Cinerama was costly both to film and to exhibit, and its commercial life was short. It was used only for travelogues, except in 1962, when the only two story-centered features were released: “How the West Was Won” and “The Wonderful World of the Brothers Grimm.” The Cinerama name was transferred to a smaller format, and then that format, too, was abandoned.

Cinerama was the high-water mark in sensory immersion. Yesterday’s Kinetoscopes and today’s smartphone screens, the low-water marks.

“If you look at the great Hollywood classics in the 1930s and 1940s, you’ll see many wide master shots and sparing use of close-ups,” says John Bailey, a cinematographer with more than 60 feature credits who serves on the executive board of the American Society of Cinematographers. “But with the advent of TV and now also with smaller screens, we’re seeing more close-ups.”

The problem, he says, is that “if you use close-ups immoderately, then when you need to make a more dramatic point, you have no other option but to use extreme close-ups.”

“The best camera,” the old saying goes, “is the one you have with you,” and a similar thought is apparently held by increasing numbers of movie viewers, happy with the screen they always have with them. And movie producers, just as they have in the past, will probably keep adapting, changing movies themselves so that they look better on a tiny screen.

“You can say it’s ‘watching a movie,’ ” says Professor Belton of viewing on mobile devices. “But it’s not cinema.”

Randall Stross is an author based in Silicon Valley and a professor of business at San Jose State University. E-mail: stross@nytimes.com.