Dylan Hunter

Just got the below email, and as someone who waited 8 months for an iPhone, despite its ludicrous expense, but then was so horrified by AT&T’s below stance that I couldn’t possibly buy it, couldn’t put it any better myself. Posted in its entirety:

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At a packed San Francisco hearing today, the Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) defended your Fourth Amendment rights and urged the 9th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals to let our class-action lawsuit against AT&T go forward. The case demands that AT&T stop illegally assisting the National Security Agency to snoop on its customers’ telephone and Internet communications.

There’s much more at stake here than stopping the Bush Administration’s illegal spying and holding the telco giant accountable, though. The President is arguing that thin claims of “state secrets” can trump the courts’ constitutional duty to uphold the rule of law.

Without judicial review, there’s no way to protect ordinary citizens against government abuses of power. No president, now or in the future, should be allowed unfettered authority to evade the courts and trample on your freedom. As Judge Vaughn Walker wrote in rejecting the government’s claims at the lower court, “The compromise
between liberty and security remains a difficult one. But dismissing this case at the outset would sacrifice liberty for no apparent enhancement of security.”

For the past 17 years, EFF has been proud to take on the hard cases to ensure that your liberty is not sacrificed unnecessarily. Please support us in this critical case by donating to EFF at http://secure.eff.org/att. And please spread the word to your friends and family.

Join EFF today! http://secure.eff.org/att

For a News.com story from the hearing:
http://news.com.com/Appeals+court+may+let+NSA+lawsuits+proceed/2100-1028_3-6202865.html

For more about the case: http://www.eff.org/legal/cases/att

Tell Congress to stop the illegal spying: http://action.eff.org/fisa

Leaving aside the issue of Yahoo trying to get back at seven folks who obviously have talent and skill, and chose to take that talent & skill somewhere else,*1* is an excellent reminder of making sure to wipe all your personal stuff, (including IM trails that are defaulted “on” in Trillian) before handing that laptop / desktop back over. I actually just modified the settings on my laptop to move the Trillian logs into my normal My Documents folder, so that I will remember to DL and delete when I clean it, rather than leaving them deep beneath the default Trillian Program Files directory, (which I _totally_ wouldn’t remember to pay attention to). Suggest you do the same!
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*1* As is their right if Yahoo wasn’t helping them sufficiently achieve their goals - i.e. Google’s “Everyone should have a chance to make $10M” thing - if you’re a major company making hundreds of millions / billions, and you don’t provide a way for your folks to make life-changing money for company-changing contributions, you’re just asking for your best talent to keep running out the door, and thus for your own company’s competitiveness to continue to fall, eventually to the point where you’ll have to think about bribing your customers to return / continue to use, (and if you don’t think there’s a causal relationship here…).

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BTW - Is anyone else hating that WordPress 2.0 keeps changing href’s to xhref’s, even when you’ve turned that option off in the Options tab? I wouldn’t care if either IE or Firefox actually supported xhref’s, but they don’t, so they end up just underlined or colored, and useless! ).

Now _this_ is useful - 2 good solid things that could be done right now by SE’s to limit the ability of governments, (i.e. Beijing, The Bush Administration) to make you party to their immoral, and what should be illegal, acts:
1) Figure out a way of how to get by without cookies / user profiles / click-through redirects, (certainly more than a tad problematic re: relevance, and nukes the possibility of user-adaptive search, but certainly worth experimenting with and seeing how much actual effect it would have vs. the gain of actually _not having_ this kind of info, even if subpoenaed).

2) Set all activity to use SSL to make it more difficult to spy on info traffic, (’course, am sure each and every government will try to put up barriers to this use of SSL - Bush would say that being able to snoop this info is critical to finding someone who’s doing research on how to build a dirty bomb, Beijing to find someone who’s trying to figure out how best to promote self-determination for Taiwan and / or Hong Kong).

You know, it’s this kind of crud that really makes folks hate MS, (and others who engage in such similar tying practices*1*). You’ve got one thing that folks want, which you then use to force them to buy something they don’t want - it’s tying, pure and simple - another anti-trust violation, (where oh where has the lawsuit vs. MS gone?).

Yes, it does goose the per-user numbers in the spreadsheet, (so long as you’re not also modeling adoption rates and/or "probability of switch to competitor" which you just dropped and boosted, respectively, by at least 8-10 full percentage pts each).

Appealing to Bill & Co is a waste of time and effort, but for the rest of us, I’ve said it before, and I’ll say it again - focus on building products that people want and need and they will _happily_ buy from you / be advertised to on your site. Stop wasting time, effort and money on restrictive pricing schemes, endless pointless litigation, etc.

The most disappointing part of this, of course, is that, though I personally hate the idea of one company having the level of power that MS does, and am not exactly what you’d call the greatest Windows supporter, to be fair, it’s a solid product, and there are, indeed, people who are fully happy using - there should be no need for these kind of heavy-handed tactics.

If MS is worried about adoption rates on Vista, then they’ve got to do something real like not requiring _major_ reinvestment in higher-grade hardware to accomplish - geez, there’s an idea! How many of us remember all the additional money that we had to spend, and how many perfectly good PC’s all got shelved when Win95 came out? And if the adoption rates, especially on the corp side were too slow for Bill, et al’s taste, by God, they should have planned it better and built Vista to _work on what we all have now_! Forget this crud about tying Halo 2 - make the balance between cost, (Total Cost - which, for Vista, also does include all the new hardware that we need to buy to get it) and value fit your customers, and things will work out fine. Push down too hard on the cost side to your benefit vs your customers, and the number of people who will consider the balance struck will be all that fewer, and you deserve the results you get.

Anyway, breathe…. relax…. enough about Vista - this was about pathetic pricing tactics, and am sure you’ve more than got the idea by now!

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*1* Though MS bears the brunt tenfold-plus, of course, because they’re controlling your OS - Apple, where’s that version of OSX that’ll run with BIOS?! And/or Go Novell - finally make that new Linux Desktop 10 a viable alternative!

Hear, Hear! Good for our kids to help remind us of how to conduct ourselves, (they do that a lot! )!

Kids at a Florida elementary school refused to sell candy to raise money for a field trip, having just completed an educational unit on health and well-being. The widow of Dr Atkins was so moved by their commonsense that she donated $16,000 to their school so they could afford the trip without selling junk-food.

More

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BTW - for anyone else wondering about the etymology of "Hear, Hear!" it’s here, here, (ok, so I’m a linguistics geek, too - not terribly surprising, is it? ).

A long time coming, glad to hear it’s finally here, (ok, almost here - the site was down when I went on). Also does definitely open up another whole series of potential apps for other companies to build up from, (is one of the things that really is so foolish about proprietary apps without API’s / docs for folks to build and extend - the more folks build _on_ your product, the more they _use_ your product).

For those family-friendly folks in the audience, please ignore the last, entirely unnecessary question… More.

A follow-on to my moment on NPR. The not offering Gmail or Blogger in China’s a nice touch. We’ll see how long that holds. More

They say everyone gets their 15 seconds of fame, I just got my 1:45! A good episode of OnPoint talking about Internet Censorship and Surveillance, including whether Search Engines were colluding with repressive governments by filtering results in China, Iran and others, (including France! ). The discussion started to turn a little dark toward the Search Engines being active and willing participants in such repression, so I called in and hit them up for the right answer, given the practices of even our own government post-9/11, (where any search engine can be subpoenaed covertly for query logs on anyone / everyone, and you’re not even allowed to disclose that such a request was made).

Didn’t get one, of course, (unfortunately, short of some kind of supranational authority to preserve the ideals we have, but which other countries definitely do not share, I don’t know what that answer could be - I _really_ wish that I did).

Anyway, pull up the broadcast, go to 36:01, and you’ll hear “we have a call from Dylan in Northborough” - guess what - that’s me!!!! Yeah!

Another good little blip on free music file sharing vs. paid in Europe. The most important part of the article - “Among the 46% of European online 15-24 year olds who use the Internet to consume music….40% do not consider the CD to be a good value for money…”

The RIAA and IFPI can and will*1* continue their campaigns against their members’ most involved consumers, but so long as this situation remains, where consumers feel like they are receiving less value than they are giving up when consuming music, there will continue to be a strong, and well-motivated free file-sharing community.

As someone who’s had to work free-to-consumer business models for years now, there is _absolutely_ no question in my mind, there _is_ some level >0 where the majority of these folks would feel like they were receiving an even exchange for their money, and would indeed pay for it.

Now, I know full well there’s not a chance in hell that the established music industry will engage in the real hard work of trying to figure out how to make this thing work until someone else, (Apple, others) forces them down a path, so, suppose will have to look to keep helping be that force! *2*

More here
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*1* Since that’s effectively their sole purpose in being, and they’re now smelling blood with the horrible recent US Supreme Court Grokster decision

*2* And I know the companies that support the RIAA and IFPI would never in a million years consider this, but it definitely keeps occuring to me - maybe, as multimedia continues to become more and more prominent, music as a fully-independent media vehicle has largely had its run, and it’s time to do something different. I can’t even begin to tell you how many times I’ve thought to myself that when I buy a SharkTales or Robots DVD, I think I should be able to bring it with me in the car, load it into my CD player, and get the soundtrack as part of the package. If you want to goose the price of DVD up by, say, $1-2 / unit to pay for that, yeah, I’d go for that, and then you, Music Companies, would get, let’s say, $24 / yr, (presuming one kids’ DVD / mth @ $2 royalty) for someone that otherwise might spend $18, (presuming 2 soundtrack purchases / yr) or a net increase of 33% on Gross Rev, not including the fact that if my kids’ DVD included such soundtrack for that $2, I’d definitely be tempted to buy more of them, (gated, of course, by the quality of the content that the movie industry can come up with, but hey, wouldn’t that be something - two different media divisions of many of the same companies pooling time, effort and resources to actually help develop better content - I know, I know, whoa Boy, what are you thinking? ).

Silent media - long dead.

Black and White media - largely had its run.

Non-HD video media and Non-Interactive media - both have maybe another 10 yrs of life.

It’s time to start not just thinking about, but actually working toward, the kind of much better marriage of value generated vs. cost required that can do away with the horribly conflicted relationship between music companies and their most voracious consumers that exists now, (and then we can all stop wasting our money on the RIAA & IFPI, since it’s _our_ funds that are being used against us).

Now this is awesome news - not only in the functionality itself, (which is awesome enough by itself - can you tell that I’ve been salivating for a Tivo for several years now! ) but in that it’s the first sizeable / useful player*1* who’s writing software to use the iPod the way it should be, while concurrently sidestepping Apple’s currently restrictive role toward innovation in terms of what kinds of software, etc. can be used on / with the iPod. Though they did a truly beautiful job on the physical design of the player, there are many things I’d like to be able to differently with both the firmware*2* and iTunes, being specifically built to keep me from doing some of the things that I’d like to, (i.e. move files from the iPod back to the PC, even those files are legally mine) is, by definition, stunting.

Enough blathering, though. The rest of the release is here.

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*1* No disrespect to iPodder at all - I still use it to this day, as I find it much more powerful / useful than iTunes’ treatment of Podcasts, (with the exception of the “keep only the most recent option in iTunes, which I would love to have in iPodder, as well). Unfortunately, once iTunes sucked in Podcasts, iPodder, as an open source project, has effectively just rolled over into obscurity, putting the prime method of interfacing with the iPod back into Apple’s hands, which, even if I like Apple, allows their sole calls to limit what can and can’t be done with something that yes, they developed, but in its potential impact, really should have, (and hopefully still will) move well beyond them. TiVo, of course, has both the economic incentive and power to build, maintain and hopefully further excite more-than-Apple innovation on these kind of mobile devices.

*2* Most notably, modify the nature of how the directory structure functions as makes best sense to me. Though it’s definitely a very nice first shot, I hate not being able to modify to be easier for me. In addition, there is so much potential for the iPod to be used as an interface for a whole series of apps, but can’t do those, either, the way Apple has it set up.

Ok, now I’m thoroughly disconcerted… By now, we’ve all heard of Sony’s XCP/DRM/rootkit fiasco, (and we’ll leave any more commentary on to the many others who will be so tempted - limiting my only addition to another in hopefully a growing chorus plugging membership in the EFF! ).

But now, if I want to remove Sony’s unauthorized invasion into my computer, I have to trust and DL MS’ anti-spyware app? Good God, what’s next, Satan offering to help me fend off Beelzebub? Now this _is_ heavily disturbing - I need to evaluate who is more evil - Sony for not only their foolish DRM stuff, but, more importantly, their horrible attitude to letting people remove it once they were “outed,” or MS, who is only using this as a thinly-veiled play to increase downloads of their Giant software, which really has little other purpose than allowing MS to scare the bejesus out of any normal user who installs anything that keeps IE from diverting a whole mess of free traffic over to MSN, (you didn’t seriously think anyone actually _chooses_ to go to MSN for anything other than Hotmail, did you?)

Scylla and Charybdis all over again….

Just wanted to relay a superb story about a job very well done by Amazon. A couple of weeks ago, in an attempt to let me get more of my thoughts out,* poked around a bit, saw some great reviews on the most recent version of Dragon’s /ScanSoft’s / Nuance’s Naturally Speaking, and, after seeing the Preferred version on Amazon for $120 after rebate, (really wanted the Pro version, but come on, $600+ - did they hire somebody from MS to do their pricing?) plopped down the credit card and *phoosh*, 5 days later had my hands on a bright new copy of Dragon. Installed,** and was off to the races.

Inside the box was the rebate form, which said that this wasn’t a periodic rebate to try to push product toward the end of the year / in prep for the next version launching next summer, as I thought, but was really just an upgrade rebate, so applicable to, at most, maybe 1 in 10 of the folks who might see. Short version, after complaining to Amazon about how misleading I thought this was, (and yes, it apparently is shown similarly on CompUSA and several others, so it’s not an Amazon-only thing) without an ounce of complaint, etc., their customer support rep decided to take the hit for the $50 schuyster from ScanSoft even when I hadn’t asked them to, and in so doing, cemented themselves as an excellent example of the kind of business practices we all should have, (listening to their customers, empowering their workers to make the calls, and going above and beyond what’s being asked, knowing that the long-term value of the customer relationship is worth _much_ more than a single point-in-time issue, so make it go away - they’re not all the way up there with L.L. Bean - they’d have to offer to take back any book after you’d read it for years and years, no questions asked to get there, or at least have switched the way that it’s listed on their site for everyone else, (i.e. it’s still included here as part of the standard price - but, for me, I’m very happy, and they deserve a solid “Atta Boy!”

Snippets from the text of the incredibly short (again, right on target) email exchange is below:

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<snip>

Thank you for writing to us at Amazon.com.

First, I would like to convey to you my sincere apologies for any inconvenience you may have experienced with your order.

I understand your concern over the rebate which is only available to a small subset of the population.

Customer satisfaction is my priority. In an effort to compensate for the rebate I have requested a refund of $50.

This refund should be issued to your credit card within the next 2 to 3 business days. We will send you another e-mail to let you know when it has been completed. You may also view refunds by
clicking the “Your Account” link at the top of our web site, then clicking “Go!” next to “open and recently shipped orders.” Completed refunds appear at the bottom of an individual order’s summary page.

In addition to our large selection, one of the benefits we’d like to offer our customers is convenience, and I realise that we have not met that standard in this case. I hope that you will give us another opportunity to prove the quality of our service to you in the future.

I hope this solution is satisfactory. Once again I apologize for such an inconvenience.

Thank you for shopping at Amazon.com.

<snip>

Best regards,

Rupal Mehta
Amazon.com Customer Service
http://www.amazon.com

<snip>
>
> COMMENTS: Just wanted to send along a note as to how disappointed I
> was by your inclusion of ScanSoft’s upgrade rebate, which is only available
> to a small subset of the population, rather than being available to all, as
> part of the mainline price displayed for this item. When I purchased this
> product, I was expecting to eventually pay $120 for it, which is probably
> the most this was worth to me.
>
> From a legal perspective, I’m sure you guys are more than covered, but
> from a customer loyalty perspective, I think it misleading to include these
> kind of heavily restricted rebates as part of what you suggest is the true
> cost of the item, (is the equivalent of listing the MS Office full edition
> for the price of the upgrade one - it’s just not the same).
>
> In the past, I have had nothing but good things to say about my
> experiences with you guys, and not going to make a huge issue about this
> one, (i.e. I’m just going to suck it up as having been beaten out of $50)
> but wanted to let you know that by including this rebate in the
> regularly-suggested price, I’m afraid this feeling of having been
> schystered out of $50 I just wasn’t planning on having to spend really
> leaves a bad taste in my mouth in doing business with you, (and I’m sure
> I’m not alone in this of the people who purchased this) and next time, I’m
> going to have to think twice as to how comfortable I’m going to be in
> purchasing from you, (and yes, I could certainly do while reading the
> legalisms of this, that and the other, but you know what, I just want to
> buy something from someone that I feel comfortable isn’t going to make me
> waste my time jerking around with legalisms - there is a strong value to me
> of buying from folks who do “what’s right,” not just “what’s legal.”
> Thanks, Dylan

<snip>

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* Am sure I’m not alone in losing _so_ much that I once knew / experienced, for the simple reason that, quite frankly, typing is a pain in the butt and inefficient - talking is _much_ better, but can’t afford to have a perma-secretary transcribing my every thought!

** And to hopefully save others even the $120, honestly, even after several hours of reading training docs, it still only works sufficiently to be a curiousity, not as a real interface - come on, Folks, I know voice recognition is hard, but for even recognition of a single individual to be as hit-and-miss as this is after all that time blathering Dilbert and 3001: The Final Odyssey, (or whatever) there’s _no way_ that “Beta” shouldn’t be stamped all over that thing, (I don’t care if it’s Version 8, it’s just not good enough to call itself a finished product). Also, as relates specifically to this issue, I know there are some ridiculous shelving fees being charged at the SKU level by retailers, but sorry, an Upgrade-only price, (which is really what this turned out to be) is a different product, different SKU, not a rebate!

For all of us who’ve had to deal with the Chinese Government in relation to content on the Internet and the freedom of information when considering expanding into China, an excellent reminder of the face on our calls when we accede…

Will let the eloquence of the writer speak for itself.

For those of you who know me, you know how much my wife and children mean to me - how much joy they bring into my heart every day, (yes, even when my wife is driving me nuts! ) how much I truly feel honored to have them with me in my life, (was funny, yesterday when I stopped in at the grocery store for something quick at lunchtime, the checkout girl said “I’m not used to seeing you without your girls - you don’t look right…” - she made me smile - and yes, she was right, I don’t look right without them! ).

My most recent bit of amusement came this morning while I was driving my younger daughter, Erin, (3 1/2) to her school. While waiting for my elder daughter, Katie’s, (5 1/2) bus this morning, the kids were on Nick Jr watching LazyTown videos - if you haven’t watched, you really should - it’s an excellent show, with really good messages on nutrition and exercise, (he says from sitting in a cushy chair by the fire inside a Panera - a highly recommended work environment, btw - free Wifi, all the coffee you can drink, made fresh for you, and some mighty tasty goodies! ). And, of course, as almost always happens, the songs got stuck in our heads, so we were singing “La-C-Scouts,” (the show comes from Iceland, so both Sportacus - who really is stunning with his flips, pushups, standing on one hand on a soccer ball, etc - I couldn’t do _any_ of that, even when I was in tip-top shape! - and Robbie Rotten have Icelandic accents - a “z” becomes an “s,” a “u” becomes an “o,” etc. - I love listening to accents, and having worked for a Norwegian company for 2 yrs, this kind of feels like “old home!” ). And when Erin was singing “sluggish,” she sang it as “sloggish,” which gave me quite a good laugh - my elder daughter has gotten a bit of a Dominican accent when she speaks Spanish, since her teacher was from the Dominican Republic, and my younger is definitely starting to have a bit of an Icelandic one on some of her words! Good for them - I’ve always loved languages and accents, am glad that they’re developing, as well, (’course, the elder one won’t take corrections, so horse is “cabaejo,” rather than “cabaeyo,” so soon, if Erin follows suit, I may have to start referring to her as “Helga!” ).

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BTW, for the Nick Jr folks, (pitched to the woman in charge of in March / April, but can’t remember her name, and didn’t put her in my Contacts folder) - very simple enhancement to your site if you don’t want people pirating your content - if you’re dying to remove content from the main area where it’s accessed, (in this case, the video player, and, come on, it’s time to broaden out to include Firefox!) please make sure to provide an accessible archive somewhere - the kids love to watch videos on Nick Jr,* and it breaks their heart, and thus ours, to have to say “I know you liked watching Stephanie singing “Bing Bang,” or Robbie Rotten doing “You are a Pirate,” (thank you for bringing back this morning!) but I’m afraid we can’t anymore, it’s not there…. And you make a tech-savvy parent have to say “no” to their child for something that stupid, look for downloads of VirtualDub to start to rise to take make _your_ ability to disappoint _our_ children go away, (trust me, the _last_ thing good parents need is additional assistance in saying “no” to our children!) - hence the problem with many of these stupid DRM systems - when DRM is combined with poor choices, especially when young children are involved, you’re just _begging_ to turn folks into pirates, (”Yar Har, Fiddle-dee-dee”). And the pressure for this to happen didn’t need to be there - foolish choice, with fairly well-foreseeable negative consequences, (to both the site and the brands).

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* Even with those crap forced ads that you can’t skip by after 5 videos in the last couple of weeks - bogus, just bogus - I know you’re comped only on rev from the site, rather than the effect the site has as a branding tool to keep getting us all to purchase more Dora Live tickets, or Maya & Miguel Backpacks, etc., and that’s a bit of big-company foolishness, but come on, if you’re going to do a forced interrupt ad, you should at least be able to skip by, if you want to - there’ll _still_ be plenty of ads shown, you’ll still have facilitated an additional series of nags to us parents to buy this or that, etc. - online is supposed to be Interactive, which means User-Controlled, but back to our above story….)

More of interest. What would certainly be an interesting additional cross would be including which online newspaper sites require registration / payment for access to their online properties, (which is a truly horrible idea, IMHO - I know there’s both the reality and the potential for very significant cannibalism of their offline business, which is currently more profitable, but come on, we’ve all managed to figure out one way or another how to make a nice living online, and to turn folks who would otherwise be interested in what you have to say, but would not actually go out and purchase a newspaper - I can’t tell you the last time I held a physical paper in my hands! - anyway, enough tangent for now, sorry, as I said, my mind lives in perma-tangent! )

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Hometown News Holds Online Newspaper Readers

A new report from Nielsen//NetRatings and eMarketer indicates that that readers in almost every city in the top 10 local markets have been loyal to their top hometown paper. Local newspapers claimed an average of 19% of the local Internet readership, and held the top spot among the city’s online readers for online newspaper sites. The exception was Philadelphia, in which online readers favored USA Today over the Philadelphia Inquirer.

The Washington Post managed to reach about 30% of its local market, followed closely by the Boston Globe (28.3%) and the Atlanta Journal Constitution (26.4%).

Local Market Reach (%) of Top Newspaper Web Sites in Top 10 US Metro Areas, July 2005

Newspaper

Local Market Reach

Washington Post

30.1%

Boston Globe

28.3

Atlanta Journal-Constitution

26.4

NY Times

21.9

Chicago Tribune

21.9

Seattle Times

16.7

Dallas News

15.9

LA Times

15.4

SF Chronicle

13.9

USA Today

9.6

Source: Nielsen//NetRatings, Sept. 2005

On a national level, the New York Times, USA Today and the Washington Post captured the greatest number of Internet users.

National Market Reach (%) of Top Newspaper Web Sites in Top 10 US Metro Markets, July 2005

Newspaper

National Market Reach

Washington Post

5.7%

Boston Globe

2.4

Atlanta Journal-Constitution

1.4

NY Times

9.3

Chicago Tribune

1.9

Seattle Times

1.5

Dallas News

0.8

LA Times

3.1

SF Chronicle

2.5

USA Today

7.1

Source: Nielsen//NetRatings, Sept. 2005

And, according to eMarketer, US newspapers will reach online revenues of $2.26 billion in 2008.

Online Revenues of US Newspapers

Revenue ($xBillion)

2004

$1.03

2005

1.40

2006

1.71

2007

1.91

2008

2.26

Source: eMarketer, Aug 2005

YES!! Absolutely love this - found an excellent page that shows exactly how to set up sshd on a WinXP box, (via Cygwin). Perfect - now I can finally shell in to my home box whereever I am to get files, do work on my home PC, finally fully access the PC’s in my home, etc., (ok, not “fully” - I’d need a gui login for that - but getting closer - then I could finally only load up programs, etc. on one box and run them from anywhere - dealing with lag, of course - ’tis one of the prime reasons that I keep playing around with Linux - that, and my just general aversion to any one firm having that much power over something, especially one with the highly questionable business practices of MS).

Note for most solo-WinXP owners that’s not in the article - you will need to put a password on your user account to SSH in. Go to Control Panel>User Accounts, click on your user, (if you’ve never dealt with users before, there should be only one) add a password and click “Ok.” This will make logging in a bit less seamless in that there’ll be a logon intercept page that you’ll now have to enter your new password for every time you reboot / startup, (which is a bit of a hassle) but it’s not terrible, (at least until your wife, daughters, etc. want to get on the computer and don’t know the password - ah well, security’s always a bit of a pain in the butt).