
The Biggest Tech Problems So Obvious We Aren’t Fixing Them - steven
https://medium.com/backchannel/the-biggest-tech-problems-so-obvious-we-aren-t-fixing-them-87f4b708a7f1
======
acqq
"To wit: our digital world doesn’t have a good system for identifying us, or
helping others confirm that we are who we say we are. Because no one has
solved this problem, we all live in dune-drifts of lousy passwords."

No. It's that we don't want to have the equivalent to "certificate
authorities" mess for our identities too. We don't want the "obvious"
"solutions" because we are aware of the bad effects of them.

~~~
ectoplasm
Yeah, the prologue to this was an example about credit card fraud. It seems
like by far the weakest link is the poor security around credit card numbers.

~~~
acqq
Credit card fraud detection is actually the "good working system." The author
complains that he has to enter the new one on all the sites he uses. Well duh,
the reason he got the new cc number is that only the vendors he really needs
get the new one. And he complains that the sites don't know that "it's he" so
he has to write down the passwords to which I answered that the alternatives
are central authorities and they appear to be the worse solution than the
problem.

Is there anybody here who'd like that Google or Facebook or Microsoft or
Verisign or the government opens all the sites he visits? The named entities
would be happy, it seems.

~~~
jandrese
I remember when Microsoft first suggested single signon for the Internet
(Passport) and everybody on Slashdot had their pitchforks out and started
writing long screeds against giving a single company so much aggregate data
about their browsing habits.

~~~
acqq
Yes, I remember that I was almost scared as I imagined how wrong it can go. I
remember being on some MS organized conference then, even the attendees there,
you know, at that time every new technology from MS was cheered by default,
were highly skeptical. The guy on the stage wanted to "sell" it, he even did
something like "who trusts MS" and raised the hand, an almost nobody followed
him. Then he said "I trust them, because, why would they not be straight?"
Really.

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ChuckMcM
I've noted the printer problem in the past (I tend to call it crapitalism, the
equilibrium point between price tolerance and crap tolerance, and a lot of
people are way more crap tolerant than I am.) But I think for folks here who
are wondering what sort of startup to create its a good way of thinking about
the question.

~~~
shawkinaw
Funny, I came to the comments to dispute the printer point. I have a <$100
wireless duplex laser printer (Brother HL-2270DW) which works really well.
It's not color, but does everything I need it to do. Maybe $100 doesn't
qualify as cheap.

~~~
wil421
In my experience Laser jets have always been much better than ink jets. My ink
jet printer requires $120+ dollars for color and black cartridges. Black
cartridges are usually much cheaper.

Some advice I received years ago was to forgo a color printer altogether and
use Kinko's/UPS Store to do color. The cost savings are very good if you dont
require a lot of color printing.

~~~
ssmoot
I bought a Konica Minolta 1600W Color Laser Printer on Amazon a few years ago
after being frustrated at the infrequently used ink-jet cartridges going bad
yet again because I didn't print enough.

I think it was $120. Still on the original colors (replaced the black). Toner
gives me a lot more prints, never goes bad because of disuse, and looks
better. I love it.

Now I just wish I could find a no-drivers AirPrint compatible Color Laser with
the same reliability and price point that was as small or smaller (so it still
fit in my IKEA printer stand with rolling door). Haven't turned up such a
device yet so I'll stick with this USB printer for awhile yet I guess.

It was discontinued years ago, but toner refills are still readily available,
for about the same price as a new set of Inkjet cartridges (except again, more
capacity, and if you only use it once every 6 months it won't complain and
make you buy a new set).

Anyways, IMO Color Laser is definitely the way to go for the home user. The
printers are pretty reasonably priced these days, and the TCO is _drastically_
lower than any Inkjet printer I've ever owned.

~~~
ansible
The easiest thing I know of to do with dried out ink cartridges is to use
steam to open the nozzles.

------
tdees40
Remote controls. Why are they terrible? Why is no one fixing them? Why is it
literally impossible to walk into a friend's house and decipher the tangle of
remotes for TV, cable box, XBox, sound system, etc, etc. I'm staying with
friends for a few days and literally couldn't watch TV.

~~~
dublinben
Universal remote controls are a solved problem.[0] Don't blame the technology
industry, blame your friend for not including the small cost of a proper
remote into their home entertainment budget.

[0][http://www.logitech.com/en-us/harmony-remotes](http://www.logitech.com/en-
us/harmony-remotes)

~~~
chadgeidel
I have a Harmony remote, and love it, but it is slower to respond for many
devices. It is also absolutely inferior when compared to BT devices (my Roku
and my PS3 come immediately to mind).

I wish the manufacturers would come up with a common standard for remotes -
perhaps over BT - and just have one "universal" app for my phone. Ehh.

------
beat
I think of "fish don't know they live in water" problems... problems so deeply
endemic to a specific field that the practitioners of that field don't realize
it. It's as ordinary as breathing to them.

I'm devoted to solving one of those myself, in the configuration management
space. When I get it off the ground, lots of happy fish (well, engineers) will
know about the water.

~~~
thaumasiotes
I've never understood the popular idea that fish can't recognize water because
it's all around them. Here are some equivalent ideas:

\- No human culture has a concept of air.

\- Humans can't tell whether wind is blowing or not.

\- Abolitionism couldn't happen, since slavery was present everywhere, and
therefore the concept of not having slavery didn't exist.

~~~
SiVal
The concept is not that fish CAN'T recognize water, it's that it's more
difficult for (metaphorical) fish that have always been immersed in water to
notice water than for (metaphorical) animals that have seen both water and no
water situations. The way it's usually stated is that fish are likely to be
the last ones to notice water.

It's the idea that you are more likely to ask yourself why traffic lights use
red for stop and green for go instead of, say, the reverse the first day you
visit a country that uses different colors than you were the previous day.

~~~
thaumasiotes
You're giving a lot of people much more credit than they deserve.

[http://fishcantseewater.com/](http://fishcantseewater.com/)

------
sosuke
"Everything Beyond the Developer’s Over-Contemplated Navel"

I think the push to learn everyone to code might fix that. That is the open
source way right? You have a problem, you can fork it, fix it, create it. It
works great for determined people.

Otherwise my response is to learn how to fix it yourself. I learned to code, I
taught myself, made the investment, and by gosh I am going to fix and
contemplate my navel.

My paid jobs however have taken me all over the place, in all sorts of fields,
but each shared the same thing, there was money to be made. Find a way to make
money and serve the under-served and you will shortly have developers
developing there of their own accord or as employees.

------
fweespeech
As interesting as the idea of the piece is....none of the mentioned problems
are actually problems for me.

My printer has worked for years without an issue. I don't use too many tabs.
I'm perfectly fine with my collaborative editing tool [git].

Credit card fraud authentication is a massive problem....but no solution can
actually be completely secured so its a cost/benefit. Sure, the author
cares...but ultimately, authenticating the new vs. old credit card number and
choosing which vendors to provide it to is a choice the author has to make as
he is the only one who can do it securely. :/

~~~
LoSboccacc
meh I don't see it so big of a problem. first is a problem for banks, not
ordinary people, they bear the cost of fraud

secondly there already are solution in the space that split authentication
from payment tokens (i.e. paypal and more recently the super annoying verified
by visa / mastercad securecode) and are safe enough and good enough

------
dmschulman
I'm at a happy medium with the Tab Overload situation, though I would welcome
a fantastic app that helped me save content in an intelligent way for
consuming later.

Currently I browse in Chrome, keep a window with things I prefer to read
later, then go back to that tabbed window when I have the time, or more
conveniently, access those tabs from Chrome on my Android phone when I'm out
and about and have some time to kill.

~~~
robertcarter
Give the chrome extension OneTab a try

~~~
angersock
I don't understand people with a bajillion tabs open. If you're referencing a
bunch of man pages, sure, but generally it just seems like people load up with
the intention of reading later, and never do.

Just read the damn page, close it, and move on.

~~~
dmschulman
Well bookmarks never quite worked for me, they're more clutter than they're
worth and tend to get lost in the pile.

I've organized my web browsing into a few different Chrome windows based on
tasks, one window for personal browsing (articles, a forum post I'm
monitoring, a tutorial I'm following, etc), web development projects (self
explanatory), job hunting (can't apply to every listing at once but I also
don't want to misplace these), DIY electronics projects I'm working on
(schematics, build manuals, references), and items to read later/long form
stories I can't finish in one sitting.

If I end up putting some of these topic areas on the backburner I'll close out
an entire window and uses Session Buddy to save those links. I'll have to
check out OneTab as suggested, looks somewhat similar.

It's not perfect but it works. I use one desktop as my personal and work
computer so I need to organize myself around those divergent areas or else I
really get lost. When I want a mental break from work I'll go browse HN and
open the stories that interest me in new tabs but I'm aware that I don't have
the time to read all these items (hence the need to keep an active tab on a
background window). Mental break #2 comes along and I already have a few
articles ready to digest.

------
smithbits
Networking. Every time I see a non-technical friend have to know anything
about the DNS to set up a website it makes me cringe. And while we're at it,
why isn't my new laptop online by default? I realize that there are tremendous
problems of configuration and security, but I should be able to unbox my
laptop and not care about how many G's there are what the wifi passkey is or
what the letters CDMA stand for. It should be as invisible to the end user as
memory management.

------
agentultra
My current favourite "blind spots" are municipal services and identification
in the notary sense.

Municipal services are still driven by lumbering bureaucracies that worship
paper forms and take weeks to make a decision on anything. This makes the
process of interacting with them tedious, error prone, and daunting. Worse
still is that it can take weeks for program approvals and to issue permits for
repairs and renovations.

The identification issue is that almost all of the above and for legal
documents often the only "proof" of identity is a signature. We have much
stronger guarantees available that are verifiable and terribly difficult to
impersonate. When I bought my house there was a stack of papers to sign that
relied on good faith that I wasn't forging the signature and representing
myself faithfully... but they could never know that for sure. They were also
happy with having me email them sensitive documents without any encryption or
verification at all.

Andy Rooney would be rolling in his grave [0].

[0]
[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=r6U4IF39kqM](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=r6U4IF39kqM)

------
Mz
I didn't read the detailed list of what the author _thinks_ we need to fix,
but I enjoyed the beginning of the piece. I especially liked this paragraph:

 _So how do you see into such a blind spot? How can we periscope around the
corner of our assumptions and peer into the future? If we want to create a
list of the blind-spot problems that await better solutions from tomorrow’s
innovators — which is what I want to do with this piece — where do we begin?_

I wonder a lot about how new things start successfully. The piece that
intrigues me is: If you know you are doing something genuinely different and
valuable, how do you cross the chasm from everyone telling you it will never
work to actually having some meaningful number of users? How do you get other
people to see what you see and that you are not just another dime-a-dozen
loser with some half-baked idea?

That intrigues me and I don't know the answer to it.

------
andy_ppp
Opt-in, web based, democratic world government is my penny in the well...

Unfortunately instead of tax they'll just sell everything they know about you
advertisers!

------
ris
This is a highly stupid article, written by... some dude(?) who then goes and
berates the developers who he wants to fix these gripes of his for "navel
gazing".

For what it's worth, I don't really see any of the points as blind spots. I
think there have been many attempts to solve all of them.

~~~
mason240
Exactly. The author is free to solve these issues anytime.

Until then, he is nothing but an "idea guy."

~~~
LoSboccacc
well he didn't even provide real solutions, so he's not even that

------
skizm
Random question: is there any way to disable that menu from popping up when
you highlight text on Medium? I could write a little chrome extension to strip
it out but would rather just turn it off for good.

------
snoonan
For the past few days, I've been thinking about easy to use encryption and
signing for everyone.

------
louithethrid
Memory and Batterys? Or Batterys and Memory

------
zapdrive
Number 1 has already been solved: Bitcoin.

------
callesgg
Blind Spot 1: Authentication, Yes it is an actual problem.

Blind Spot 2: Tab overload, It is called bookmarks...

Blind Spot 3: Collaborative editing, Google Docs.

Blind Spot 4: A printer that isn’t junk, You get what you pay for.

Blind Spot 5: Everything Beyond the Developer’s Over-Contemplated Navel, vote
with your wallet.

