Kickstart my heart

Kickstarter is interesting. It's kind of a toothless microloan economy where you exchange a return for a preorder for a consumer good. I first heard about it through my new Twitter hero, Bryan Lee O'Malley. (You may know him from such classic Graphic Novels as Lost at Sea. Oh, and something or someone called Scott Pilgram.)

Politics and philosophy aside, I actually think that is one of its strengths now. Kickstarter gives talented designers an opportunity to fund and create a well-designed or unique product that may not otherwise have enough mainstream appeal for the average investor.

Basically, you decide to "fund" the project if you like. Depending on how much money you give, you'll get different reward tiers. Usually, the first tier is a preorder for the product. The lower, super expensive tiers... Well. You'll just have to find some highlights on your own.

Here are two products I'm thinking about right "funding" right now.

Pebble is an E-paper watch. Besides being a cool-looking watch, the Pebble ties in to your iPhone via Bluetooth and allows you to control music, view certain alerts and, potentially, do a lot of other cool things through apps. It could be mine in black for as little as $115, or in one of four colors for $125.

An odder project, that better exemplifies what makes Kickstarter cool, is the Berlin Boombox. It's a cardboard "Boombox" that you put together using a do-it-yourself kit. It's not a dock, really, because it uses a coaxial stereo cable. And it's like $60 to get an actual cardboard boombox, which is a lot for something that probably has $10–15 worth of components. ($5, strangely, gets you a "mixtape" by one of the creator's DJ friends.) But it looks pretty cool.

Trojan.KillAV.E

I would consider myself a fairly savvy denizen of the internet but having been on a Mac OSX platform for the better part of the last decade, I have become a bit lazy when it comes to computer security. I trawl the deep web with nary a concern for viruses or malware. Even my phishing spidey sense has started to atrophy.

A few weeks ago, I received a text informing me that I had won a $50 dollar gift card to [REDACTED]. I haven't shopped at [REDACTED] in over a year but a recent New York Times article discussed how [REDACTED] was using predicative technology to lure shoppers so my brain made the leap that maybe this was one of their new promotions. Or, my brain continued to rationalize, maybe my parents had entered my number in some contest and simply never bothered to tell me. As I was getting ready to send a response, it finally dawned on me that our last sacred bastion, the cell phone, had finally been conquered by spammer barbarians.

I was further humbled by the latest news about the Mac specific trojan Flashback. For the past few weeks as I surfed the web, a pop up would appear pestering me to update Adobe Flash. The first few times, I didn't even bother reading it; I saw the Adobe logo and just swatted it down like some pesky fly. But after the umpteenth time, my patience reservoir was exhausted and I blindly hit update. Thus as I read an article detailing how Flashback baited users by masquerading as a Flash installer, my heart dropped. I had secretly laughed at all those suckers who fell for MacDefender, yet here I was scraping humble pie off of the floor like some common n00b. My mind raced as thought of all of the websites I was going to have to change my password on. Yet by some mysterious grace, I had been spared: when I ran the defaults read command in Terminal, my computer came up clean. It turns out it actually had been Adobe all along.

I guess it's better to be lucky than smart.

A Hole in the Wallet

In a surprising karmic upset, EA won the dubious honor of "Worst Company In America" from a former Mark's favorite links site The Consumerist. Americans must be suffering from outrage fatigue in other sectors of the economy: I guess we are already inured to Ticketmaster's "Convenience Fees" and AT&T charging $20 a month for the luxury of sending 37 byte texts across their immaculate SMM network.

Digital Rights Management has always been a way of life for PC gaming but the rise of $10 "online passes" and on-disc "downloadable content" in the name of combating piracy and used game sales is a new phenomenon for console gaming. The disillusionment of the gamerati must have reached a fever pitch right before the Consumerist vote when a "press leak" revealed that next generation consoles will lock out used game sales by locking content to a single account. I can only assume this was a strategic release of information to gauge customer dissatisfaction. EA, the corporate juggernaut whose own terrible DRM network Origin was recently heckled at a games expo, bore the brunt of this when it looked like its anti-consumer nickel-and-diming was going to be institutionalized by Sony and Microsoft. [Don't even get me started on what EA is doing in the iOS ecosystem.]

Or maybe I am just reading a little too deeply into the tea leaves. Maybe nerds are just upset that EA botched the ending to their precious Mass Effect franchise.