Category: Office Tech

I have been seeing a bit of a trend lately.  The trend is free wifi that is blazing fast, many tens of megabits per second both up and down.

At right is a speed test result for the free wifi in the Wisconsin state capitol in Madison, Wisconsin.  And this did not even require me to accept some terms and conditions.

Some time ago a friend was in the new Whitney museum in Manhattan.  Again blazing fast, eighty megs down and fifty megs up.  And again no need to accept terms and conditions.

It’s nice when this happens.

What’s the fastest free wifi you have encountered?  Please post a comment.

The last time I tried to use the public wifi at the USPTO, which was a few months ago, the login process was so cumbersome that eventually I gave up and used my own wifi hotspot instead.  The last time I did successfully log in to the public wifi at the USPTO, which was a few months before that, it was embarrassingly slow, slower than 100K bits per second up or down.  Basically voice phone modem speeds.

Can someone who has recently made use of the public wifi at the USPTO share a comment about how fast the wifi was, and how easy or difficult the login process was?

Used to be that to accept credit cards, a business had no choice but to open a “merchant account” through a bank.  The merchant account had a monthly service fee of at least $30 and required purchase of a card reader costing $500 or more.

A couple of years ago, startup Square offered a new way that a business could process credit card payments.  An inexpensive card swipe reader would plug into the user’s smart phone.  With no monthly service fee and no signup fee, Square became very popular among small businesses.  Close on its heels, Paypal launched its own very similar service.  Then a year ago, Amazon decided to take over the market with its Amazon Local Register service.  Amazon promised a smaller commission (a mere 1.75% compared with 2.5 to 2.7% for Square and Paypal) and backed the system with its well-known brand name and market clout.

Then October of 2015 kept getting closer and closer, and this was important because in October of 2015, there was going to be a “liability shift” in which a merchant would have to absorb the losses from credit card fraud if the store failed to use the “chip” in a credit card.  Square sent out new card readers to its users, card readers that could read a chip as well as swipe a magnetic stripe.  And Paypal rolled out a super-sophisticated card reader that would read a chip, swipe a card, or even accept a contactless payment such as Android Pay or Apple Pay (and that cost $150).  Industry watchers watched Amazon to see what it would do for its users of Local Register.  Would Amazon mail out small and inexpensive chip card readers to its users as Square had done?  Would it invite its users to purchase super-sophisticated $150 readers as Paypal had done?  Or would it move to the head of the pack by rewarding its loyal customers with free-of-charge super-sophisticated card readers?

I was astonished to learn today that Amazon has given up.  It will not do anything to make it possible for its users to read chip cards.  Amazon stopped signing up new Local Register accounts today, and users with existing accounts will only be able to use them until February 1, 2016.  Amazon is abandoning the merchant credit card processing business.

What should existing users of Amazon Local Register do about this? Continue reading “Amazon scraps its Local Register service”

(Summary:  SIP telephone service is really neat and you should learn about it and use it if you want to be trendy, modern, and up-to-date.)

“Over-the-top” is a general term for the Schumpeterian sort of disruption that we see over and over again as various categories of commerce get disrupted by new distribution mechanisms (generally involving the Internet).  We see the traditional world of record labels, a world in which ten or twenty years ago a handful of companies had a stranglehold on the distribution of music.  A world in which I had no choice but to purchase a “record album” of maybe ten tracks to get the one or two tracks that I actually wanted to listen to.  That traditional world is now in the past, replaced by an over-the-top world in which the consumer can download the one or two tracks of interest by clicking around on the Internet at iTunes or Amazon.

We see the traditional world of video entertainment, a world in which ten years ago a handful of cable TV and satellite TV companies had a stranglehold on the distribution of things like HBO and sports event broadcasts as parts of bundles of dozens or hundreds of channels which the consumer was forced to buy to get the two or three or four channels that the consumer actually wanted to watch.  That world is likewise gradually receding into the past, with OTT mechanisms like HBO Now and Netflix and Hulu and CBS All Access.

I’ve recently encountered some aspects of modern telephone service that also count as over-the-top, new services called “SIP” that bypass the traditional landline telephone companies and that will likely be as disruptive in the telephone world as the OTT services have been for music and video.  I will tell you about some of the SIP services. Continue reading “Over-the-top as it relates to telephone services”

(Summary:  Install Android Pay on your smart phone and use it, because it is trendy and modern and up-to-date and greatly reduces the risk of someone misusing your credit card information.)

The last that you heard from me about digital wallets (blog article) was that Softcard, the non-Apple digital wallet, had bitten the dust, and that Google had rather carefully not actually purchased Softcard but instead merely purchased its IP (mostly, its pending patent applications).   This left Google Wallet as the successor app for Android phones.  Google Wallet was decidedly clunky in several ways.  Industry observers stood around waiting for Google’s next step, whatever it might turn out to be.  Now we can see Google’s next step.  It is Android Pay. Continue reading “Adopting a digital wallet – now Android Pay”

Every one of USPTO’s e-commerce systems — EFS-Web, TEAS, RAM, ETAS, and others — has a place where the system forces the user to answer this question.

Continue reading “USPTO should not require “credit card type””

In our office we have two wifi networks — a secure network that is available only for employee use, and a public network for visitors.  (Actually it’s three wifi networks — a 5-GHz secure network, 2.4-GHz secure network, and a 2.4-GHz guest network.)  When a visitor arrives, the usual first step is to get their smart phone or tablet or notebook computer connected to the guest network.  The old-fashioned way is, of course, to give the visitor a piece of paper with the system ID and password, and they hand-key this information into their device.

But there are nice new ways to do this.  Continue reading “Using NFC to make it easy for a visitor to use the guest wifi”

This blog post discusses two mistakes frequently made by users of Microsoft Outlook. Continue reading “Two mistakes frequently made by users of Microsoft Outlook”

DNSSEC is an important protocol by which DNS zone records are cryptographically signed.  The protocol permits an internet user to be confident that a particular web site is what it purports to be rather than a fake or substitute web site created by an intermeddler or wrongdoer.  The protocol also offers many other benefits too numerous to discuss here in detail.

I use GoDaddy for hosting of this blog and I use GoDaddy to provide DNSSEC protection for the blog.  Unfortunately GoDaddy has implemented DNSSEC in a way that does not work well with the way that it provides blog hosting.  This has led to three intervals in the past year during which the DNSSEC protection did not work for the domain blog.oppedahl.com.  The result has been that some visitors (those whose connection to the Internet is sophisticated enough to make use of the protection offered by DNSSEC) have been unable to visit the blog web site during those intervals.

In technical terms, what GoDaddy has screwed up during those three intervals is that it has stopped providing DS records for blog.oppedahl.com in the oppedahl.com zone file.

It is a big disappointment that GoDaddy did not fix the bug in its implementation of DNSSEC after the first failure, which was about a year ago.  When that first failure happened a year ago, it looks as though GoDaddy fixed the problem manually, by manually re-inserting the all-important DS records into the zone file.  But did not correct the underlying problem, which is that GoDaddy’s DNS setup for blog.oppedahl.com is fragile and breaks at the slightest provocation, like changing some other record in the zone file.

Then around eight months ago some change that should have been harmless led once again to GoDaddy failing to provide DS records for blog.oppedahl.com in the oppedabl.com zone file.  GoDaddy eventually got the DS records back into place, but again apparently only due to some manual update.  GoDaddy’s mistakes in implementing DNSSEC generally remained uncorrected.

Three days ago the fragility of GoDaddy’s implementation of DNSSEC revealed itself again, because once again GoDaddy stopped providing DS records for blog.oppedahl.com.  What’s frustrating with GoDaddy is that when I try to explain the problem (the blog.oppedahl.com subdomain lacks any DS records), the response from the GoDaddy tech support person is the telephone equivalent of a deer in the headlights.

The image above, from VeriSign’s DNS Analyzer, shows that GoDaddy is to blame.

Anyway after something like the fourth call to GoDaddy tech support in three days, I finally reached someone who understood the problem.  And supposedly GoDaddy’s “advanced tech support” will now manually re-insert the missing DS records into the zone file.

Of course what needs to happen is that GoDaddy needs to correct its implementation of DNSSEC so that it handles subdomains (such as blog.oppedahl.com) reliably rather than in a fragile way.

So anyway if you have been unable to reach this blog during the past three days, that’s why.