Software

If the news is true, then I love Symantec, the makers of Norton antivirus software.  They are currently in the middle of a limited pilot program for Norton One, which is meant to provide full computer security coverage for non-techies.

Although Norton One will be on the expensive side, it sounds like it may be worth it for the hands-off experience it’s supposed to provide. One account can be used on five devices; will include 25GM of online storage and a really simple online interface. The installation is as simple as they can make it, with a customized link sent to your email with the license key already entered. The best part though is that it comes with access to “premium” support which promises that calls to customer service and tech support will be answered within 2 minutes. It will be released for sale in the spring in English speaking countries only: the US, UK, Canada, Ireland, Australia and New Zealand.

The idea of finally taking fairly complicated software that everyone needs and making it match the tech comfort-levels that everyone has shouldn’t be a novel one. But it is. This is the first software of its kind.

I’m not too afraid of technology but for us naturally cautious (and clumsy) people out there, every time we play around with our computer’s security appears like a chance that we will accidentally delete everything we own and open our computers to hackers, spammers, ID thieves and alien spies. The more hands off I can get my computer security the better.

And there are plenty of people out there more afraid of their computers than I am, although I’ll name no names (cough-Dad-cough). For their sake, I’d like to think that this will be the beginning of a trend. Although all software is created to be user friendly, I’d like to see more software very specifically keeping the non-techies in mind.

Online piracy has been a popular subject recently, thanks to SOPA and other legislation around the world. But software piracy has its own share of the spotlight, in a David and Goliath legal battle.

Faxproducts.com, a subsidiary of Black Ice Software LLC, claims that Essilior of America, the country’s largest optical lens manufacturer bought their Print2Email product to use on-site within the company but gave the license key out to its own customers. BlackIce says that if Essilior had paid them for all of the computers that are using the software, they would have made $13.1 million, rather than the $999 that they actually received.

Essilior has been using the software as part of their Visioffice product, which lets eyeglass customers look into a camera and “try on” glasses and have them fitted. The Print2Email software allows them to send the pictures to friends or family to get second opinions about which frames look best. Users originally were given temporary free trial versions of Print2Email, but when those began to run out, Essilior would remotely log onto the user’s Visioffice account and put in the company’s license key which was supposed to be for limited use.

This made me wonder: As consumers, should we be on the lookout for this kind of thing? On a day to day basis, internet piracy is a much more common dilemma we face. However, software piracy is an issue for individual consumers as well. According to BlackIce, users may not have known that they were using a license code that had not been paid for. That means they can’t be blamed, but perhaps software piracy is something that as consumers we should learn to recognize.

Of course, that comes back to a greater question of consumer responsibility.  How vigilant we’re prepared to be and how much we’re willing to invest to be ethical consumers is a question we face with every individual purchase we make but unfortunately, there is no right or easy answer.

There are plenty of stories out there about failed inventions finding a new life in a completely different niche (just check out play-doh and post-it notes if you need proof). But in this story software gets a brand new use despite its great success in a totally different area.

Aurora Clark, a professor at Washington State University is using the technology behind Google’s PageRank software to search molecules. One of Clark’s students pointed out that the interactions between molecules are very similar to links between webpages. Google uses those connections between pages as an important part of the algorithm used to rank web pages. MoleculaRnetworks, created by Associate Professor Clark, with Barbara Logan Mooney and L. Rene Corrales, ranks water molecules  by how many hydrogen bonds they’ve made and how many bonds each of the neighboring molecules has made.

This idea allows chemists to simulate molecular shapes and chemical reactions without actually having to do the experiments in a lab. Not only does that save a lot of time and money but it can also be much safer, especially for scholars like Clarke whose research centers on toxic metals like uranium, plutonium and lead. She and her associates have published an article explaining the new software in the Journal of Computational Chemistry. Ms. Clark says that even though the software currently focuses on water based molecules it could easily be modified in the future and used to help find causes of disease and to develop medications.

This is a great example of something I’ve always found fascinating about modern technology. While we still work to develop tools to shape materials and create tangible items, so much of what is being invented is software that finds new ways to analyze and organize information. Even if it’s developed for a very specific type of information, it can help us look at all sorts of things differently.

So that is my hope for today: That every bit of technology I use today will give me a slightly different perspective on the world. A big part of what we do hear at Consumer-Rankings is analyze software. But for today, I’m hoping to get some tips from the software itself about new ways to see the world.