Small Fish, Big Pond

Like I said yesterday, Wired’s article is already making waves. Chris Anderson was interviewed on NPR about it this morning and this afternoon it made the news crawl on CNN.

One thing I like from the NPR interview is that Chris mentioned that by dead he’s talking about Web transitioning to Mobile. Which in a way is very true. Although he still talks about how applications rule and that they will kill the web.
Here’s an experiment to see if he’s right: Use only apps, no web browser.

Go 2 days without ever opening Firefox, IE, or safari, chrome, etc.
Don’t use Google (it’s a WEB page).
Try getting the things you want done with only dedicated web apps. No diversity of the millions of online web pages, just the 20 or so apps you can load before your phone fills up.
Don’t be fooled by apps that redirect you to a browser, they’re cheating.

Basically Chris’s prediction of the future of the web is where the multiverse of web pages is boiled down to a handful of corporate apps that port and filter the web for you. Much like the archaic AOL days in internet prehistory. And that scares the shit out of me.

Luckily he’s wrong!

Rob Beschizza edited the fact distorting graph used by Chris for the wired article to better fit reality. Pay close attention to the red “web traffic” That is “dying”. This is just the same graph but adjusted using the same data used for Wired’s article to reflect the actual amount of traffic passed in each category.

In Wired’s article it shows web use as a percentage against other high bandwidth internet traffic. Now that we can see the actual amount of web traffic we can see that in the last 5 years the web has almost tripled. Rob summed up Cisco’s data best:

Assuming that this crudely renormalized graph is at all accurate, it doesn’t even seem to be the case that the web’s ongoing growth has slowed. It’s rather been joined by even more explosive growth in file-sharing and video, which is often embedded in the web in any case.

In regards to using “bandwidth” to measure the value of internet traffic.

Does 50MB of YouTube kitteh represent more meaningful growth than a 5MB Wired feature?

It’s worth noting that we’re talking generalized numbers and graphs and that there will be a bit of variation in the data. But the web is still a LONG way from dying. Harry McCracken at Technologizer has another great article pointing out other technologies that have “died” recently (Hint Facebook died 2 years ago but Vinyl is alive and well).

This is one of the reasons I quit subscribing to Wired. Idiotic, sensationalizing, articles.
Now I fully appreciated the irony that I complain about Wired sensationalizing articles to draw viewers; and that by posting this I’m part of the problem, taking the bait hook line and sinker. But this article is going to be splayed across the internet and the news simply because of the source, and it needs to be killed now.

The Web Is Dead. Long Live the Internet

It’s the same tired argument that has been out since the iPhone and has sped up since the iPad. “Apps” and online video streaming are going to take over the internet and surfing web pages as we know it will cease to exist. Basically Chris is channeling a Steve Jobs presentation (or even plagiarizing one).

As much as we love the open, unfettered Web, we’re abandoning it for simpler, sleeker services that just work. -Chris Anderson

At least he didn’t call the services “magical”.

The graphic showing a shrinking web is hard to ignore, and I heard that 95% of online stats aren’t made up or distorted.

The reasons to scoff at head editor Chris Anderson as a moron?

1. The diagram is from 1995 (i.e. 7 years before most people used the internet), to 2005 (i.e. half a decade ago, 2 years before Job’s iPhone app revolution).
In Chris’s defense, 2005 was before the magical apps and services Chris describes even existed so they wouldn’t show yet.
2. “Web” is used here for a general catch-all that fits alot of very different and dynamic services.
3. Anybody with an office job knows that email rules the word. Even including spam it shows up non-existent on this graph. Pointing to how this graph doesn’t reflect reality of the web.
4. Apps and services are just a frontend to parse web data. The web is still there, you’re just using a very specialized browser to access it. The Facebook app is nothing without the Facebook itself.
5. The MAIN problem with the graph is that it is a measurement of bits of traffic and not representative of the web experience.

Text on the internet is the smallest part of it. This entire article takes up the same space as a 1”x1” image. On a boring static webpage the images take up 90% of the space. To put this in perspective in 2006 Wikipedia (the entire thing) was 1.2 Terabytes in size; the whole thing could fit on one large hard drive (can you say real life HHG2G?).

Videos on the internet take up MUCH more space than anything else, especially if you’re watching a HQ youtube or hulu stream. 10 minutes of HQ youtube will pass as much traffic as all the surfing you’ll do on Wikipedia for the next few months.

Suddenly the above graph makes much more sense. Even if online video made up 90% of web traffic it would still mean that more time online is spent just surfing the web. And this is why it’s shocking the editor of Wired Magazine wrote this article, it horrible mis-represents the data provided by Cisco about web traffic. Much more useful would be how much time people spend on different web sites. However that’s much harder to measure.

I could point to their failed and horribly thought out Garmin Phone as an example but this is something much more basic that all their new products have.

About a year and a half ago I got a Garmin Nuvi 250, the price on them dropped to $100. You may have noticed on the road that A LOT of people have GPS in their cars now. This recent price drop is why.

Anyway about a week ago it told me to update the maps. Makes sense, there are a lot of places I drive that have new roads not on their maps. I hit cancel and forgot about it. Then today it nagged me again to download maps. So I go online and start the process of updating the GPS.

First off plugging the GPS into USB killed my keyboard. I don’t know why. I had to plug the keyboard into a different port to get it back, at least it didn’t fry it like the external hard drive I had a few years ago.

Then to get the GPS to update you have to goto Garmin’s website and download a browser plugin that detects the GPS. This involves a lengthy registration process I didn’t want to do. Last thing I want to do is give my email address and physical address to YET ANNOTHER company to spam me.

Now I had the plugin running and the GPS plugged in. But it wouldn’t detect the GPS

Shutdown Firefox.
Move the GPS USB to another port.
Keyboard dies again.
Move the Keyboard back to its original port.
Restart Firefox.
3 Minutes later the GPS finally connects.

Finally the GPS is discovered by the browser program.

“Click here to check for updates”
Browser crashes.
Restart firefox.
“Click here to download update.”
Browser crashes.
Restart Firefox.

Finally the update goes through and I check the Maps update. There are two options, first is a lifetime update service that costs $120.
Yes One Hundred and Twenty dollars.
Or a one time update that costs $70.

Keep in mind that Garmin street maps aren’t all that great. When the GPS was new a lot of the streets were already out of date. Plus I’m constantly aggravated by the fact that the maps never start out zoomed to the level where you see surface streets, I always have to zoom in one level.

It also tries to redirect me onto streets that I know are slower. On the way to Bear Lake instead of taking I-15 north and going 75MPH (posted) it wanted me to take a back highway to Brigham City. Admittedly highway 89 is a beautiful drive and lined with fruit stands from all the nearby orchards.
But it’s slower!

All these gripes with the GPS and they want me to pay for a map update that costs the same price as the whole flipping GPS itself. In fact I can just buy the newer model for the same price and I’m sure it would have a more up to date map in it.

Meanwhile my Android phone does all the features the Garmin does. But it also gives me:

Maps that are as upto date as Google’s online database.
An application that updates over the air bi-monthly.
Voice search.
Satellite view of the surrounding area.
Current local traffic conditions.
An ETA adjusted for traffic.
Street view pictures of the intersections I need to turn at.
Current location of any friends and family with Latitude.
The ability to search and route to any nearby business, gas station, or ATM.
And best of all it’s FREE!!!

So as soon as I find a good dashboard car mount for my phone I have a Garmin Nuvi 250 GPS for sale. Then it’s good bye and good riddance to Garmin.

It’s not April fools, not a concept, it’s for real.

Ed Fries, former VP of Microsoft’s Gaming Division created it as a pet project. You can read more about it here.

Best part of all you can play it now, even if you don’t have an old Atari 2600 hanging around.

Play “Halo 2600″ Now

Thanks Engadget

I’m famous!!!

I was looking up the Street Dogs entry in last.fm and keyed the entry into Bing. Front page bottom of the page links to my Last.fm tag directory (which happens to contain Street Dogs).

Although it’s the German version It seems my opinion of punk music is closely related enough to Street Dogs and Last.fm that Bing’s algorithms tie the pages together.

click for larger

I frankly find this hard to believe (I’m awesome but not that awesome) and suspect that Bing must have some tracker cookie influencing their results to make them a bit more customized to the place I goto. But even if THAT is true it’s still amazing that Bing could make such an amazing connection.

Still maybe I am influential enough that I’m front page news for Bing’s search.

A few people were down on Cisco for promising the “Next Generation” of the internet and then just releasing a new router a few days ago.

I’ll skip over the fact that EVERY manufacturer claims their gear is Revolutionary, Game Changing, or the Next Generation; I mean the iPad is just a big iPhone but apparently it’s “Magic”. For me magic is then a beautiful girl comes out of a genie bottle, calls me “Master”, crosses her arms and bobs her head, and creates a huge feast out of thin air.

So Cisco didn’t just create the next generation of the internet. But they built the device that can handle the throughput for the next generation of the internet and that’s just as important. Bullet trains may be the “next generation” of rail travel but without rails it’s just an expensive, immobile, hunk of metal. Cisco makes up about 86% of the internet routing devices, so when they see big bumps that means all of the web benefits.

It’s easy for casual home internet users not to realize how important the backend of the internet is but that’s only because the internet has never run out of bandwidth. Can you imagine what it would be like if your home DSL connection only ran at dial up speeds from 2pm-8pm because the net was overloaded with Hulu streams?

Luckily backend technologies are keeping well ahead of current demand and this is the moment when potential expanded to three times its size. Next Generation it may not be but this is still quite and accomplishment.

The CRS system devices are powerful on their own but their big claim to fame when originally developed was the ability to cluster the devices to create one super router. Through this clustering a single location can have the theoretical routing throughput of 322 Terabits of information. To put that in perspective as Cisco states, 322 Tbps is equivalent to transfer the entire printed collection of the Library of Congress in just over one second; every man, woman and child in China to make a video call, simultaneously; and every motion picture ever created to be streamed in less than four minutes.

Already Cisco and AT&T (ironically both my last 2 employers) are researching to put the new tech to use to create “thicker” backbones. AT&T owns most of the backbone connections that link regional carriers and even most of the undersea links coming into and out of the US. Unlike the latest smartphone, tablet, or laptop release event, or any of the new up and coming websites at SXSWi this development by Cisco will directly impact you and you life.

Sorry, I need to vent but if you work in the WAN networking industry do yourself a favor and stay away from the General Datacomm Xedge multiplexing devices.

I know they can do a lot of but they’re not worth the headache. Besides for the cost of 4 T1’s you’re trying to tie together you can get a fractional T3 with more bandwidth for cheaper.

Do the tech grunts a favor and go with the frac. T3; those are relatively easy to setup. Just some friendly insider info.

Bing just integrated a tool to their maps that polls flickr for geotagged images and overlays them against the streetview images in the same way photosynths overlay each other.

It’s not the most amazing thing but it’s nice to see a massive database like flickr be mined for locally applicable data like this.

In response Google just opened Google Maps Labs with some new features.
Is it just me or does Google Maps Labs have nothing worthwhile by comparison to what Bing released?

Drag a box and zoom is cool but I thought it already had that. I must be thinking of the millions of other map programs that do this normally. It reminds me of when Apple made a big deal adding Cut+Paste to the iPhone. It’s not a new feature, it’s just fixing an omission.

Aerial Imagery is nice when available but Bing has had that all along. Google is playing catch-up here.

Rotatable Maps only make sense on the GPS in my car, and even then it’s a bit disorientating. Besides rotating an image isn’t really “innovative”.

Where in the World game?! I’m going to stop here because this is absurd, when I’m looking for directions the last thing I want to do is get distracted playing a boring game. The only time I play virtual voyeur on Google maps or Google earth I know where i want to go.

It’s like MS and Google have switched places. Bing is testing some features that are new and could lead to alot of cool things. Google is giving us stuff that we’ve always had and expecting us to applause.

As of this moment Gmail is down. Considering how massive google is it’s hard to think that such a major part of their web presence could be smashed like this again (or maybe not, the more use, the more stress on servers).

A lot of talk is made about the future of computing “in the cloud” where businesses move all their email, apps, and file storage to giant remote server farms where they are overseen by a third party rather than supported in house by your own techs.

Being without gmail we can all get a small sense of how disruptive this can be when the company holding the basket with all of your crashes unexpectedly. Personally I only use my gmail account for non-business critical uses but if I were a fortune 500 company that had moved all company email assets into gmail I’d be losing money hand over fist right now with my employees unable to contact customers and vice-versa.

Of course anything can happen, even with in-house systems. But if you crash your own computer you have nobody to blame but yourself for not having good backups or alternatives. Plus you can still use third party systems as an extra level of backup; unless they just happen to have a massive outage that coincides with yours, ala gmail right now. But if a third party fails then it’s somebody else’s fault and no matter how well prepared you yourself were, you’re crippled by their lack of oversight, or their accident, or their being a massive malware target being a keystone company on the net.

While cloud computing has its uses I believe for business critical applications it should only be used as a backup for your own in house deployments. That way the only time you even need to care about gmail’s uptime is the 1 day of the year your in house systems are down. The chances of both being out at the same time are minuscule. But if you rely on others as your only source of email you’re always at their mercy.

I have to say I totally agree with Devin Coldewey’s post at TechCrunch about why he’s a Tweetotaller and as I’ve said here in the past I’m one too (I think my first post reviving this blog was why I’d rather blog than tweet).

I don’t like bad mouthing things, I feel like I do it too much, but as with most social networking I think Twitter has more to do with the vain action of drawing attention to yourself by shouting at the top of your lungs and less with actually getting information out.

Although I’ve seen a few examples where twitter works or has some marginal benefit, for the most part it’s a cacophony of useless input from people I don’t care to listen to. There just isn’t enough benefit for the waste of my time to sift through the chaff for the marginal nuggets of info.

How to use twitter for marketing and PR

And I’m sorry to be so pompous but I barely have time to run down my RSS feed and email in a day to bother keeping up in real time with somebody who has way more time than me and can spend their day posting their every action. I don’t even watch TV or play video games anymore and I still go to bed at night feeling like there was 4 hours too little time to get things done during the day.

For an interesting experiment take how many hours you spend reading or using twitter, multiply it by your hourly wage, and decide if you’re getting a good return on investment for losing your free time (remember time=money).

Personally I think everybody else will tire of it too; I feel the same way about twitter as I did about Myspace shouts. Eventually the next big social networking thing will come along and people will migrate over to it. Think about it, the sub-20 year old crowd can’t even get excited with twitter, how long before the novelty wears off for the rest of us?

Then again never underestimate the appeal of people thinking that having 50 followers (or 1000 “friends”, or 560 unique page views…) makes it feel like people are actually listening to you.

Wow! This is cool stuff!

While I’m not drinking the Cloud computing koolaid that most people are right now I do think it’s great technology; just not as developed for full implementation as most people think it is. In my opinion it has a lot of security and reliability issues to be addressed. Tahoe addresses the reliability issue and even delves a bit into solving the security issue.

I like to look at Cloud computing from the perspective of a big business. Imagine you’re a big corporation and have publically accessible files, and some confidential company secrets you don’t want anybody to see. For the public stuff cloud computing is great, I don’t care if Google gets hacked and people see it. But files lost due to a server crash or datacenter outage at the cloud would be bad. With company secrets, I just don’t trust putting files on another company’s network with the risk maybe half of the cloud’s servers get wiped and it just happens to be the servers with our company data on it.

There needs to be a safe way to ensure data is protected in case of an outage or server damage. And if a disgruntled employee walks out with a server I don’t want my data, or worse my customer’s data, on it.

Tahoe takes the data, encrypts it, and breaks it up distributing it into 10 separate nodes. The recreation of the original data only requires 3 of those nodes to work. The others can be lost, corrupted, or currently offline. Just so long as 3 of the 10 are safe so is the data. When applied to the servers on a cloud you can have those 10 nodes spread across multiple sites to ensure that an outage at one site won’t kill half your data. Plus if one node gets hacked, the data on it isn’t worth anything because it needs at least 2 other nodes for re-combination.

The real beauty comes in when you take the Tahoe software and use it to make your own distributed cloud onsite or among peers across the web.

Tahoe is being used in a number of different ways. A common configuration that is documented at the project’s wiki is described as a “friendnet”, a group of roughly ten nodes that are connected over the Internet and provide shared secure storage capacity with optional filesharing. Another potential usage scenario is installing Tahoe on individual workstations on an office network and using their excess disk capacity as a storage pool. The Tahoe wiki describes that kind of setup as a “hivecache”.Ars

Awesome!

Back to our imaginary corporation, let’s say we’re American Express; we have 10,000 workstations distributed through 8 work sites across the continental US (numbers are made up). Each workstation has a 320GB hard drive that is currently using 100GB (OS and business apps only, employees can’t add their own software or use more than their allotted 1GB of personal storage).

That’s 1.2 Petabytes of unused potential storage on your internal protected network purely from user workstations.

Now we install Tahoe and utilize that excess storage. First off we don’t get the whole 1.2PB, there is obviously a lot of overhead to provide the 7:3 redundant to required ratio. Let’s assume a conservative 1/4 of it is available giving us 300 Terabytes of storage.

The data can be Top Secret or Customer Confidential because it’s encrypted and each workstation only gets a portion of the info. So if you have a malicious employee (remember that most attacks come from within) they can’t recreate and access the database through the data stored on their own computer.

Also many employees may turn off their computer when they go home. So long as 3/10ths of your employees leave their computer on you’re still good to go. And even if the building in Phoenix AZ has a backhoe cut them off from the rest of the world everybody can continue on without interruption.

This is super exciting technology for me; I’ve always kind of dreamed in my head what can be possible combining P2P file distribution tech with encryption like this. I’d really like to see what a full scale deployment of this could do and how much of an improvement it would make on ROI of an organizations equipment and data.

How come I have to a peon at the bottom of the ladder rather than one of the big CIOs that can make something like this happen?

In my opinion twitter has two major types of user.

• One is important or powerful people and businesses that use twitter to blast out quick announcements to people who may be interested.
• Two is the other 99.9% of the people who just repeat the above tweets, keep us on the edge of our seats telling us when and what they are having for dinner, or bitch and moan about all the ways the world seems to be dumping on them, “32 minutes to deliver a Pizza is unacceptable!”

But today I’m thinking I may actually start using my twitter account to bitch, apparently some people are listening and will help make good on the problem… or sue you for mentioning it.

Via Ars, Woman sued by landlord over negative tweet.
But the part that interested me was this quote:

Zipcar, Boingo, one of my local pizza places, and even Allstate and Comcast have all swooped in to help out Ars staffers in need after we have aired some complaints.

Damn, apparently some businesses are actually scanning twitter and instead of attacking those who make complaints, they’re learning from them and making customers happy!

I don’t know if having tens of thousands of followers has something to do with it and this is just an example of how having more followers/influence gets you more benefits in life; or if some people are finally using the masses of twitter posts to gauge public opinion.
I’m hoping it’s more of the latter.

Tech Cruch has revealed the specifics of the Twitter leak/crack and there isn’t really anything new (previous posts here and here. It’s basically simple searching social networks of the net to gather data on people so you can crack their info. The timeline of the crack is pretty cool though:

1. HC accessed Gmail for a Twitter employee by using the password recovery feature that sends a reset link to a secondary email. In this case the secondary email was an expired Hotmail account, he simply registered it, clicked the link and reset the password. Gmail was then owned.
2. HC then read emails to guess what the original Gmail password was successfully and reset the password so the Twitter employee would not notice the account had changed.
3. HC then used the same password to access the employee’s Twitter email on Google Apps for your domain, getting access to a gold mine of sensitive company information from emails and, particularly, email attachments.
4. HC then used this information along with additional password guesses and resets to take control of other Twitter employee personal and work emails.
5. HC then used the same username/password combinations and password reset features to access AT&T, MobileMe, Amazon and iTunes, among other services. A security hole in iTunes gave HC access to full credit card information in clear text. HC now also had control of Twitter’s domain names at GoDaddy.
6. Even at this point, Twitter had absolutely no idea they had been compromised.

Pretty interesting. A lot of people point out that the hack was all through initially hacking email and that the Google Cloud was never compromised directly (thus cloud computing is secure). The fact that the data was this easy to get even when the Cloud is secure only proves how vulnerable cloud computing is. If the servers with proprietary information were kept on an internal LAN more security measures could have been brought to bear and MUCH more would be needed besides simple login name and password.

What this attack really proves is that this new web 2.0 social networking world allows strangers to create nearly complete profiles of us simply by aggregating information we post about ourselves. It’s an identity thieves’ paradise and were all happy to divulge all of our personal life onto the internet.

The future is going to be a lot more open, and for many people that may not be a good thing. If you do a lot of online social networking always assume you have a bunch of stalkers and post accordingly.

Google made a blog posting in response to recent security concerns since Twitter’s data in the Google cloud was illegally hacked.

Password strength and account recovery options

Google basically states that they provide info on how to make better passwords, and different ways to make password recovery a bit more secure. Interestingly for Google Apps they also support advanced login methods that use “certificates, smartcards, biometrics, one time password devices, and other stronger tokens”.

All cool stuff but I’d like to point out that all of this only addresses login issues. In the medieval castle analogy I made yesterday I pointed out that security is layered like an onion. The inherent problem with cloud computing is that you eliminate almost all physical security options available to you; and believe me there are a lot of amazing, very secure, network level security options available. All you’re left with is having a strong password.

A lot of people including Twitter are saying that there was no flaw in Google Apps, and in a way there wasn’t. It worked as strong as it possibly can and it was the password that was hacked. But that’s my point! Your security is only as strong as your password, and with that as your only line of defense there are no additional security checks between your data and every hacker and script kiddie on the internet.

From a business standpoint I’d never advise moving all data over to the cloud, it literally goes against all the lessons in computer security we’ve learned in the last few decades. And even as cloud technologies mature I can only foresee a hybrid-cloud business model where private confidential company data is stored onsite in a traditional manner, and public or publicly safe documents are stored in the cloud (similar to our traditional “DMZ” zone in network security).]]>

Great post on CrunchGear about the announcement of ChromeOS. In a nutshell:

“ChromeOS, like Android, is a bargaining chip. OEMs can wave ChromeOS in Microsoft’s face and reduce they price they have to pay per PC for installing Windows. It won’t work, but they’ll try. Die-hard Linux users will stick with Linux and the average consumer, when presented with Chrome, will ask where the Start menu went.”

I couldn’t agree more.

Plus Ars weighs in on the troubles of cloud computing:
Cloud computing promise still stormy with reliability issues
I think cloud computing is a great new technology but we’re years from it replacing our current computing architecture. For now the best thing is to stick to traditional architecture and implement cloud technologies as backups, redundancies and non-mission critical usage until it’s fully matured.