Comcast Suckerpunches the FCC

Federal Appeals Court Rules Against the FCC

In case you don't know anything about the net neutrality battle, there's a great video made by yours truly here that will give you a good background on it. Basically, it's the idea that the ISPs shouldn't prioritize data from one website over another - the Internet should be neutral so that all websites are on an even playing field. The FCC, whom I agree with, believe that violating this would really hurt people's ability to access the content of their choice, but they've been slugging it out with Comcast over this for a while now and now a federal appeals court has ruled in Comcast's favor claiming that the FCC is overreaching in trying to regulate the Internet. There are arguments to made for and against this, but I ultimately don't think we should give ISPs the key to the castle - whether the FCC is the one to intervene or someone else, I believe it's vital to the long-term future of the Internet that innovative websites can grow because their visitors experience the same speeds as big competitors.

I believe the next level of appeal is the Supreme Court, and I'm sure the FCC will want to appeal because this is a key sticking point for Chairman Genachowski. Of course, the Supreme Court could refuse, which would implicitly support the lower appeals court, or they could overturn it and essentially make it legal for the FCC to regulate an ISP's network management practices. It's a really sticky situation because it's definitely unclear whether the FCC has this power but if they don't then who does? Wouldn't it be anti-competitive if companies like Comcast could take advantage of this uneven playing field to drive competition out of the market? They could help foster monopolies on the Internet.

I know I'm just beating a dead horse here, but I'm just trying to make sure people don't forget about this issue, especially when it comes time to pick their congressmen. The future of the Internet really is in our hands, don't let a big corporation convince you otherwise.

iPhone OS 4.0

In a pretty sudden special event (a bit out of character for a company known for being meticulous with these events), Apple finally announced the next iteration of the highly lauded iPhone software. If you don't want to read all the gory details, you can get the short version here. There are a number of new features, but the biggest ones are "multitasking", improved notifications, a totally revamped mail app, the iBooks app from the iPad, an online multiplayer video game network, and support for Bluetooth keyboards.

This is a pretty awesome update for iPhone users, all told. I'm not sold on the multi-tasking one, but the others seem great, especially the improvements to mail and that video game network. They may end up killing Windows Phone 7 out of the gate with an early counter to Xbox Live going mobile. Regarding multi-tasking - I don't think you can have background processes running persistently, I think it's more that you can just save state while the user does something else. The Palm Pre has true multi-tasking where your open cards can do stuff while not in the foreground. You've gotta love the irony (this is common with Apple, so no surprise) that for the longest time they've been lambasting multi-tasking and how much it'll hurt battery life and now they're saying (literally) that it will "change the way you use the iPhone".

You have to appreciate that they're towering over the competition in the US market but they're still working on pretty significant improvements and staying very competitive. They also dedicated a small portion of the event to enterprise users, which is going to have to be a huge growth market to them because they've been losing the battle thus far to the corporate favorite: RIM.

One thing they mentioned that hasn't gotten a whole lot of attention is their mobile advertising platform: iAd. This is them really locking horns with Google and adds another element to their already complicated love/hate relationship with Google. Between this and the growth of Android though, things are definitely heating up between the two giants. The platform will allow iPhone app developers to let Apple vend ads on their apps directly and collect a tidy 60% of those revenues. I think it's definitely a fair bit of competition to Google, especially considering that Android doesn't have anything comparable in its platform.

HP Slate Leak

Poor HP. Poor, confused HP. Engadget got a leaked memo from inside HP comparing the forthcoming HP Slate to the iPad and comparing its strengths to the iPad's threats. The real takeaway here is that it only really compares hardware. That's the problem with pitting a hardware company against a company that focuses on software but happens to also make hardware. I'm not saying that HP doesn't build software, but it's certainly not their bread and butter. They don't have an iPhone OS. They're missing the intangibles in their comparison. They don't take into account things like brand or ease-of-use or the fact that they don't have a release date and have virtually no press coverage legitimizing their product. While the iPad had a lot of negative coverage, it got people talking about it and considering it, and that's what's been driving its sales. What's going to drive people to buy a Slate, especially at a higher price than the iPad? Windows 7 is great and has been improved for touchscreen devices, but it may be too late for the HP Slate by the time it hits the market. While I think a tablet that can do everything Windows 7 can do is preferable to just a souped up iPhone OS, the people buying the iPad seem to really care about the simple user experience the iPad provides. Will they feel the same about the Slate?

This Week in Open Source

Ok, there's not that much open source news, but there are a couple of things worth noting.

WebKit, Apple's open source mobile browser engine, is getting an upgrade to allow for a split process model and a non-blocking API. The former is kind of like with Google Chrome where one bad tab isn't a poison pill that crashes all your tabs. The latter is really just a performance tweak for web developers to take advantage of. It's so exciting when I think back to the days of Blazer on the Palm Treo being the best mobile browser to see evolution like this in the mobile web. I believe that mobile websites are going to become more and more a key component of the Internet, especially with smartphones becomes so prevalent and affordable (though, obviously, we still have a ways to go in market penetration).

Even more interesting: Songbird is no longer going to support Linux in future releases. This is kind of a shocker because it has probably become one of the most popular, if not the most popular, music manager on Linux since its inception just 4 years ago. Given that it's open source, the community could always come forward and work on it, but the official creators of Songbird are focusing on Mac and Windows because they just can't afford to move forward with their Linux version. It is kind of interesting that Linux has received such a beating between Sony nipping it on PS3s and Microsoft no longer supporting it in Enterprise Search, but I don't think this is the beginning of the end for Linux by any means. Linux is a great OS for data centers and software development, and I think it will continue to flourish at least for business uses even if it doesn't gain much headway in people's homes.

Yelp's Advertising Gets Bit

It pains me to speak ill of Yelp because I love the site overall. I use it all the time. However, as much as I try to forget about it, Yelp has had a good amount of press (at least online) for questionable marketing practices in threatening businesses to promote worse reviews if they don't pay Yelp for their services to promote better reviews (and delete bad ones) instead. Amazon does nothing of the source and sorts reviews with a complicated algorithm to better serve customers, but I guess Yelp decided to go a different direction. A Miami lawyer is bringing up a somewhat high-profile case against Yelp and probably really hurting their PR. In response, Yelp has decided to no longer choose hat reviews appear first in its listings, but I'm guessing the lawsuit will continue on to get punitive damages.

The Quickies

Ok, it's been a long day so let's wrap this puppy up.

Unvarnished is a new site (in limited beta) that's akin to slam tables from college. It will allow you to write whatever you want about your co-workers to influence their reputation. I'm afraid that it could get dangerous (i.e. shills and slander), but it's a fascinating concept, to say the least.

Gmail has launched some really cool new labs including Sneak Peek to allow you to preview e-mails via right-click. There are some other features that have come out that I missed, like a preview of your Inobx while it's loading that I missed whenever they came out, so be sure to browse the the list of labs if you use Gmail.

This is a great roundup of the top videos that destroy iPads.

Anyone in IT will want to check out this survey to see how their salary compares to their local market. It's a somewhat biased survey and relies on self-reporting so it's not 100% accurate, but it's probably not a terrible ballpark - especially if you're considering a job in IT somewhere.

I love this Mashable article too much to pass it up - it's all about how Facebook influences how we date and I thought the timing was great given the recent Facebook Southpark episode.

This is a really nifty idea: surround vision. Imagine everyone in your living room having a personal device to look past the edges of your TV for more visual data in a scene. Seeing the little video is believing, but, of course, who knows if it'll end up being practical in the long run.

Perking it Up

Be Wary of Tech Firm Perks
There wasn't a whole lot of news last week, which is good because I have a really full plate this week and need to get into the office early tomorrow. I thought I'd kick off things with this article about tech firms trying to outperk one another in the face of a job market where there's a limited supply of talented software engineers. There is a big difference between a software development engineer and someone who learns how to write code from a book. Even with some industry experience, depending on the company/companies they've worked for they're not necessarily going to be so talented and for these companies it's cheaper to beef up the perks to attract top talent than risk cheaper talent that may end up being harder to maintain in the end. It may seem exuberant in a down economy, but that's the way capitalism works. It's all about supply and demand. There is real value to these perks, too, in how people perceive going to the office. A lot of people seem to drudge through their weekdays whereas at a company where getting a quarterly award means a weekend with a Lamborghini is quite a difference.

However, I'm here to warn you about these jobs. I don't want to name names, but there were companies that were offering awesome perks (tempting to me, for sure) that laid off employees last year. Having perks doesn't indicate job security. The sexy jobs aren't necessarily the best horses to bet on. I don't want to discourage folks to take calculated risks in joining startups, but I think it can be misleading to be pitched on all these great benefits only to have them later taken away when the economy goes into another recession. It's important to ask yourself this question: if the only compensation I received at my job was my base salary (with any cash and stock bonuses) and health benefits (I'm including medical, dental, and vision here), would I be happy with what I do? Let's assume that the culture for the most part stayed the same also, you just didn't have free yoga twice a week. Do you do your job for the perks or for the work you actually do? I think if you pick with your heart what you'd really like to do then you're on more solid ground. I think it makes sense to also consider a workplace with job stability if you have a mortgage or a family, too, but I don't think all the recruiter-speak should be what sells you on a job. Now that the CS job market is heating up, caveat emptor is more or less in full effect for those of you looking for a job or looking to switch jobs.

The iPad is Out

The iPad has now been officially released. A few reviews came out last week with one of the most glowing ones coming from PC Magazine. Their review was so positive that it almost seemed like the reviewer was already really positively inclined for the iPad and was willing to belittle some of the big drawbacks. And, granted I'm biased for the Kindle, I thought they were a bit dismissive of the Kindle in the wake of the iPad when the two are completely different devices. I'm sure that it's a great device for what it is, but I think value should be a consideration in a review, as well as the lack of major things like Flash. Still, the mixed reception may indicate that it's not going to be the flop it was predicted to be.

Gizmodo has also been doing its best to review as many apps as it can and it looks like there's some really good stuff out there.

Google Blocked in China

Google's saga with China may have finally met its end. Google stopped censored off and on for the past couple of months in the wake of an attack from a Chinese computer that was at a university but the US government believes was a cover for an implicitly sanctioned cyber attack. Now, the Chinese government has blocked Google's Chinese site and damned Google in the media as being co-conspirators with the US government against China. This was in the wake of Google's announcement to move the site offshore and Google has said that they may have to close their sales offices in China. This is pretty serious for Google employees there who could be considered enemies of the state as a result of their relationship with Google. I wonder if the people there wonder that their government's sudden response to this seems odd like maybe Google isn't the one in the wrong, especially since it was such a strong brand in China. Google is giving up a lot of money and potential business if they don't fight back on this, and they may morally decide that it's not worth the money to get back into China. If they do decide this, then kudos to them for having the moral courage to do that.

4G is About Congestion

Ars Technica has a really great article about 4G being a response not to speeds being super slow on mobile devices, but rather the fact that congestion is killing data availability in areas with perfectly good coverage. It's an important point to be made because I've heard people dismiss 4G because they don't think the speed boost is necessary and may hurt battery life on current generation cell phone technology, but we're outgrowing our 3G networks. AT&T is a prime example of that in some of nation's bigger cities. I may be one of the few people who believe in the future of 4G, but I think there's good reason to hope for the best there. Depending on the implementation, 4G is usually more scalable than today's 3G networks, and that's ultimately what we need to sustain growth in our consumption of data. We shouldn't let infrastructure hold back innovation, especially if there's a need for it. It's hard to consider that when 20 years ago we didn't "need" e-mail on-the-go, but the world is ever-evolving. I'd like to think we're mostly evolving for the better.

Windows 7 Market Share Strong

Windows 7's numbers are out for March and it looks like the young OS already has more than 10% of the market. Though XP is still the biggest piece of the pie, Windows 7 is gaining share much more quickly than Vista did and there may not be an end to this growth for a while.

As great as 7 is for most people, it's not without its flaws. According to data compiled from Microsoft's security bulletins last year, 90% of known vulnerabilities in Windows 7 can be fixed by removing admin rights. Though, to be fair, I don't think any OS has admin rights down quite perfectly yet. It's a tough nut to crack in compromising convenience for security.

Windows 7 being the first solid OS release from Microsoft in quite a while may show a change in the times for Microsoft. They're even experimenting with putting Office Starter on new PCs where Microsoft would make money off of people then upgrading to a paid version. I'm not sure what's gained in the paid version from the Starter, but I think it'll be great for lower income families.

Final Notes

Ok, I dragged on a bit longer than I meant to tonight, so time to wrap up.

CNN has a great article explaining why Internet is faster in South Korea than here. It's partially because of their land being less spread out but it's also a result of intense competition, which doesn't exist so much here since we have so many local monopolies (or small oligopolies).

If you're not concerned about your passwords, then read this explanation from LifeHacker on common cracking techniques and maybe you'll re-think your passwords. The key is to seed them all in a way you can remember them but then add things to them to make them unique in a way that wouldn't be too easy to guess.

Google Chat may soon get file transfer!

PC Mag has a really nice roundup of free software in several categories - it's worth taking a quick look for any needs you don't have met.

Last week, I saw John Mayer and Michael Buble in concert. John Mayer was good, but Michael Buble was incredible and well worth the price of admission. I thought I'd close off by sharing one of my favorite parts of the show: his cover of Billie Jean in homage to one of his main inspirations, Michael Jackson:

Hot Tub Time Machine

Since I was unable to post last week I stuffed in a few articles from the week before last. So if a couple of the things seem old, that's because they are. You can scroll through them if you're past them, but I marked them because I still wanted to talk about them. Even though CTIA was last week, I'd like to kick things off with a bit of a nice digression...

Hot Tub Time Machine Review

I haven't reviewed a movie in a while because I haven't seen a movie on/before opening weekend in quite a while. Today I did spend my afternoon cooking and subsequently watching Hot Tub Time Machine. I walked into this movie knowing nothing other than what was in the trailers and commercials, which never really enticed me. The movie looked like it would just be bad rather than hilariously bad, but my friends wanted to go and I wasn't actually opposed to see it and make fun of it if nothing else. To my great surprise, this film actually worked.

I don't think I have to say anything about the plot that the title doesn't tell you already. It's three guy friends and the nephew of one of them who go to a run down ski resort for a weekend and end their first night in a hot tub that turns out to also be a time machine. Up to this point in the movie, I was a bit worried because there were only a couple of decent jokes and and a few lame ones, but I'm glad it wasn't long into the movie until they got in that hot tub. To put it concisely, the casting for this movie was absolutely perfect. I don't know if any other cast could've possible pulled this off. It's almost like these parts were written for these guys. I'll admit that at times I was little thrown off by John Cusack's character because it didn't seem like John Cusack, but other than that the dialogue worked. Rob Corddry definitely stole the show. I hope this movie ends up really igniting a good career in comedy movies for him because it shows that he can really nail the delivery.

The movie ends in a rather predictable way and you can see a lot of the lessons to be learned and such coming a mile away. It's a pretty formulaic comedy. Still, the movie never takes itself too seriously and I think that's what's important. It doesn't try to tug at your heart strings because it's not that kind of comedy - it accepts that it's a down and dirty comedy and holds its chin high in the face of some jokes that you have to just shake your head at. The delivery of the dialogue in this film overall makes it hilarious and makes up for shortcomings in plot and other areas. Though it's probably a C movie, I easily give it a B+ purely for how much I enjoyed the ride. If you can get past a couple of gross jokes and a couple of really raunchy jokes, I highly recommend that you go check this movie out. Go see it in a theater for the experience of laughing it out with a lot of strangers. It's worth it.

HTC Supersonic


If you don't think that's extremely sexy, then you're not as dorky as me. Don't worry, you'll get there. It takes practice. Anyway, that is the HTC Supersonic, which is being marketed in America as the HTC EVO 4G. It got a lot of buzz last week as being the Android phone to have, like the Droid has been up til now (you can argue for the Nexus One but let's face it, few people who aren't tech savvy are buying their cell phone from Google sight unseen). This phone may have the best specs I've ever seen on a smartphone - the internals of this thing are truly a work of art. Keep in mind that for all the speed of the iPhone 3GS, it's actually not super beefed up on hardware like the EVO 4G is. I'm almost positive this phone is more powerful than the computer we had in my household about 11 years ago, and we only bought computers that were pretty advanced since my brother and I are such huge nerds. Aside from a 1GHz processor and 512 MB of RAM, it has an 8 MP camera (that's probably going a little far on the MPs there) capable of 720p video, HDMI out, and may be the first CDMA phone to support simultaneous voice and data.

The videos of this thing are really impressive. It looks to have pretty advanced camera controls and it looks like it's very capable of processing HD video, which is quite a feat in and of itself. Supporting 4G not only means having the hardware to process 4G signal, but having the processing bandwidth to handle the added network bandwidth, and it looks like they're hoping this phone can do that.

Of course, not everyone is as impressed with 4G as I am. In the context of the HTC EVO 4G and my own personal experiences with 4G, I'm referring only to the Sprint 4G network, by the way. There are several other protocols vying to be the de facto 4G protocol and that article rightfully is frustrated with this. Additionally, power consumption may be an issue for 4G. My knowledge of the underlying technology is limited but it could definitely kill its usefulness in cell phones if it ends up being much worse than for 3G signal. Still, I don't think 4G is dead in the water. 3G clearly has its limits and we're not too far off from a point where we need a wireless data network that scales better for our increased data consumption rates.

If you want to see more phones from CTIA, PC Mag has a great round up of the most prominent devices that were shown off. I don't have time to talk about all of them, but I found the Docomo phone with the removable keyboard to be the most curious. Didn't we learn from the days of the stylus pen that easily removable parts are also easily losable?

Palm Survival Guide

In the wake of the news of yet another exciting Android handset, Palm is clearly getting left in the dust. It really is sad because I love my Pre. It has some shortcomings, but I'm so used to it now that I'd honestly prefer to stay on it than switch gears to Android because it's still an enjoyable user experience overall. At this point though, it's hard to see Palm coming out of this without another webOS device. With another iPhone speculated to be coming out this summer (the timeline just fits, not sure if anything was leaked to suggest what a new iPhone would have), Palm almost has to come out with another phone this summer to survive another year, and Palm is a fighter so I wouldn't be surprised if they pulled it off. Hopefully, they're learning from the Pre and announcing their next device closer to its release date instead of 6 months in advance.

There are other lessons to be learned though and Engadget put together a handy survival guide for Palm. Ultimately, Palm had a great platform and a hotly anticipated device and just executed things all wrong. It was almost amateurish when you look back on it - surprising for a company that invented what a smartphone should truly be back in 2004 with the Treo 650. The biggest mistake they made was with their marketing campaign. I'm not sure if it's too late to fix this or not, but none of their ads gives you any indication of how simple and intuitive the UI is, or all the great apps available on it now. I saw an ad at the gym the other day that cut more to that, but they essentially need to reboot their marketing. Of course, they also had several timing problems including the release date, when the SDK was available, and the gap between launching on Sprint and launching on Verizon, which should've happened way before the Droid instead of in the wake of Droid's strong marketing campaign. The only gripe I disagree with is cutting the Pixi. I actually know a few people with a Pixi who really love it. The Centro was not a silly device and neither is the Pixi: it's a nice lightweight smartphone for people who only need a couple of of core smartphone features and like the candy bar form factor.

I'm really impressed by what some developers have been able to do with webOS, including the traditional port of Duke Nukem. So while a lot of people have already counted Palm out, my heart is still rooting for them. As Pre Central has shown on numerous occasions, there's a pretty strong community of users and developers who really like webOS and don't want to see it die.

Windows Phone 7 Will Be Locked Down

This is kind of old news now, but it's important enough that it bears repeating in case you already did hear about it: Microsoft is following in the footsteps of Apple and fostering an app store for Windows Phone 7 that is controlled and moderated by Microsoft. What's interesting about their business model here is that they're 2 years late to the party. They basically want to right the wrongs of Apple, and I just don't know if it's going to work. They're going to charge $100 a year for developers to be in their "Marketplace" and they will have set guidelines for what is allowed in and what isn't. I can see the argument that they want to maintain a nice clean platform like Apple has, but it's too late to launch a mobile platform that isn't open, in my opinion. Any developers paying an annual fee to use a platform is going to give their money to Apple. Of course, the big guys (like EA) will pay, but not the little guys, in my opinion.

There is some good news though: Netflix was prototyped for Windows Phone 7. All you need is a device with HDMI out and some popcorn and you have a mobile party.

8 Layers of Security

I have two quick pieces of hacking news for you. The first thing is that a Russian hacker has been accused of manipulating the price of several Nasdaq stocks using several hacked Scottrade accounts. I'm not quite clear on the details, but definitely one of the more interesting evils of this age of electronic stock trading.

The other piece of news is that a Frenchman was arrested by French police for breaking into several Twitter and Google accounts, include tat of the official Obama twitter feed. He got into the accounts with a technique that is more popular nowadays: using the "forgot password" prompt and correctly guessing the answer to the security question. Though he didn't profit from it, the act of hacking a database is a two-year jail sentence in France.

Aside from picking a good security question though for your online accounts, you should also build up these 8 layers of security for your computer and data. I agree with all the tips and would even suggest adding an additional, more human-based, layer of Firefox extensions like WOT and NoScript that kill the entry point for a lot of attacks triggered from clicking a wrong link.

Quickies

Ok, this post has gone on long enough and I'm now pretty exhausted. Time for the lightning round.

Google has integrated Flickr and Picasa photos in Google Maps Street View.

As a response to the recession, Verizon is pausing its FiOS expansion. Their delivery of fiber to the home has really put a damper on a lot of cable companies and this may actually improve the balance sheets of folks like Comcast that no longer have to compete with Verizon in more and more markets.

I was impressed by this list of YouTube tips and hacks, like how to download videos and linking to the middle of videos. It's a really comprehensive list that probably covers everything you've ever wanted with YouTube.

If I'm not mistaken, Samsung is the first company to officially launch a series of 3-D television sets with release dates and pricing (which start at $2,599 for a 46-inch panel). Of course, the jury is still out on the viability of 3-D taking off in the home.

These are some great Firefox add-ons for saving money, and here's one more add-on for good measure to kill those pesky memory leaks.

Have a great Holy Week, everyone!

Apple Patent Lawyers vs. the World

Apple Sues HTC

It's unfortunate that all these big negatives stories keep coming out about Apple because I'd much rather talk about other stuff. The news is what it is though.

In a way, this was bound to happen, but I guess it's been so long since Apple threatened to enforce its patents that everyone had forgotten. Apple has filed a lawsuit against HTC for 20 patent infringements. The list of patents include things like swiping on a touch screen to unlock, turning off the phone screen when held near your face, and the idea that a foreground app can send off a background process to do work while the foreground remains responsive to user input. These patents would kill a lot of modern touchscreen phones, if upheld, but some of them are OS-level ideas that I'm pretty sure had prior art before being filed. Even though the lawsuit is against HTC, Google is verbally supporting HTC and some are speculating that legal advice is being provided behind closed doors. Apparently, lawsuits aren't so uncommon in the mobile phone space where it ends up in patent trading so that people can build on each other's ideas, but I think it's kind of sleazy either way.

Apple is not hard up for money and is not by any means getting killed competitively by HTC. HTC has surely cut into Apple's market share, but probably not by enough to warrant a lawsuit. Apple makes plenty of money, so they're not hard up for money. I see 3 possible motivations here (and they're not necessarily mutually exclusive): Apple wants to bankrupt HTC to eliminate them from the market, HTC has patents that Apple wants to take advantage of, or Apple wants to scare off other competitors from building on concepts that Apple has pioneered. Except for blatant ripoffs, most other big companies in tech, like Google, Amazon, and Microsoft, don't file lawsuits like this. Most patents filed are for purely defensive purposes. It's a little crazy to say that you can't act on an idea you have just because Apple had the same idea before you did. Not all of these patents are like that, but I think several are. If you have a touchscreen phone, it only makes sense that you need to gesture to unlock it because you have no physical buttons to do it with - why should everyone pay royalties to Apple for that? I'm all for Apple protecting themselves against people making exact iPhone copies, but I don't think HTC has done that at all. I think they've been doing their best to innovate, and lawsuits like this only hurt innovation and competition.

TiVo Premiere Announced

It's been well over two years since the TiVo HD came out and TiVo hasn't financially been doing all that hot. As I've said before, I have a TiVo HD and think that the user experience is unparalleled. My brother has AT&T Uverse and his DVR setup is the closest I've seen in quality compared to the TiVo, but it doesn't have the connectivity with external services (like Amazon VOD and Netflix) that TiVo does.

TiVo has finally revealed to the world the TiVo Premiere, which is a 320 GB HD TiVo with an all new, improved interface. What's really cool, and I was hoping would be included but will actually be extra, is the qwerty peanut remote:



I've always wanted a keyboard on my TV remote for searching, so that's a pretty killer feature. Still, there's not a lot of reason to upgrade for existing TiVo users. It's only $300 so it makes sense for new buyers to pounce on it, but it doesn't sound like the guts have changed much. I wish it would support Tru2way, but at least it supports Verizon FiOS. The new Flash interface (which will finally include a storage capacity meter) is getting rave reviews from reporters who saw it at the announcement, and it's probably the TiVo search beta currently available. Hopefully it's snappier than on the current hardware though.

Of course, I say it's not worth upgrading and I really want one. It hits a sweet spot, in my opinion, with storage capacity (at least for a single person) and I really want that new remote. It'll be interesting to see how the market responds to it.

Windows Phone 7 Game Demo

Microsoft showed off something at TechEd that has created a lot of positive buzz since about Windows Phone 7. They demoed Indiana Jones being played on the PC, then on a Windows Phone 7 device, and finally on the Xbox 360. What's unique here is that the game state is being shared between all 3 to provide a seamless gaming experience. Well, seamless except for that the graphics are drastically worse on your phone than on your Xbox 360, of course. Still, I'd be impressed with your phone having a mini-game that ties into your game progress instead of tying into exactly where you are in the main game. It's exciting that for the first time in God only knows how long, Microsoft is trying to innovate with their mobile platform instead of just replicating stuff that's already out on the market. The question now is whether or not December can come soon enough in a market as hot as the mobile OS market even with as unique a feature as this gaming experience.

Lifelock on Lockdown

You have probably by now seen an ad for Lifelock at some point. They claim that they proactively guarantee the safety of your identity for a monthly fee and even challenged that you'd get a million bucks if you could steal the identity of their CEO, given his social security number. Of course, someone did eventually withdraw money in his name but not sure if he ended up getting that reward money. Well, the FTC is investigating them for deceptive business practices and being too forceful in trying to gain new customers. Lifelock was unable to deliver on its promises because it didn't protect customers from the most common forms of identity theft, and they had almost no security for customer's private information on Lifelock's corporate network. It's ironic that their slogan is that no one else guarantees your good name because no one else can. It looks like Lifelock couldn't either.

Less interesting but more importantly, the US government has declassified part of its
cybersecurity plan, which excludes monitoring private traffic but does include deploying intrusion detection systems on federal networks, which I'm pretty happy about because that was my short-lived research interest in college. The basis of an IDS is that it tries to detect behavior that's uncharacteristic for a system and raise an alert for such behavior - it's preemptive rather than reactionary like most mainstream security software is. The plan also calls for improving the security of private critical infrastructures. With China threatening the likes of Google, we can use all the precautionary network security measures we can get.

AT&T Claims Tiered Pricing Inevitable

In the world of cell phones, we've always had tiered pricing on voice but almost always have had unlimited plans for data usage (not including text messaging, of course). Well, AT&T has already started rhetoric preparing people for tiered pricing, and it's a bunch of bologna. It shouldn't be possible for a mobile phone to use enough data to really put a heavy dent in AT&T's network, so I'm really skeptical that 3% of smartphone users could be using 40% of AT&T's network capacity. Maybe they should work on a better network - they have plenty of cash from all their iPhone users. The claim that they're in no rush to push out a 4G network, which means they want to charge people more to stay on a slower network than competitors like Sprint. It just doesn't make sense. To their credit, they claim no short-term plans of tiered pricing, but it's clear that they're not dealing well with the burden of so many iPhone users. It's just astounding that they don't believe the bigger bandwidth and reduced latency offered by 4G isn't going to help them out as much as sticking with their current infrastructure.

Hulu Loses Heavy Hitters

In the world of media conglomerates, Viacom is a pretty thirsty beast. Unfortunately, Hulu's revenues couldn't quench Viacom's thirst and so Hulu has lost their two biggest shows: The Daily Show and The Colbert Report. It's odd that Viacom thinks that they can do better with these two properties than Hulu, which is a fairly established brand nowadays. It's well known in the mainstream, especially because of the recession as people cut out their cable providers. Contrary to the Christian Science Monitor, I don't think Hulu is in quite as deep of a hole as it may seem. Hulu still needs more time to grow revenues, and as other offerings gain success, I think Hulu will show that not only is having your shows available online is approaching a point of becoming vital, but no one does it more efficiently or effectively than Hulu. Of course, YouTube is probably Hulu's biggest competitor, but YouTube is definitely not as browsable for this kind of content compared to Hulu.

More Competitors to the iPad

I don't have much to say about either of these devices, but I definitely think they're worth knowing about. The HP Slate is starting to materialize by way of official video footage, and it's clearly proud of running Windows 7 and supporting Flash, which Steve Jobs is still trying to woefully will out of existence. While I can see the argument for HTML 5 being better in the long run and Flash maybe not being so vital on a small device, I think it's absolutely important on a tablet in the short term and it's definitely one of the things HP should capitalize on. More importantly though, the Slate will give you more freedom to run the applications you're used to if you're already on Windows 7 on your desktop/laptop. Whether or not people want that experience is yet to be seen though.

Meanwhile, a fresh leak has been dropped regarding the Microsoft Courier, which is a tablet that looks like a foldable booklet. The video footage revealed is similar to what we saw months ago, but still very exciting. Who knows if it'll ever become a reality - it seems more like a concept bred from a set of requirements than anything else.

Closing Stories

Ok, as much as I love my new laptop and how much easier blogging is on it, I have other things to do so I'm going to wrap this up with some quick stories I still think are worth taking notice of.

I have too much App1e negativity in this post already, so I'm not going to really talk to the heinous secret agreement Apple has its iPhone developers sign. It's so detrimental to the developer that I'm almost surprised that it's legal.

Real Networks gave up their fight for Real DVD, which aimed to legitimize DVD copying by replacing the DRM already on DVDs with their own DRM. I don't know if it kills the future of copy protection, but it could've created a major precedent so it's definitely a disappointing ending.

Gizmodo has an excellent article detailing the sordid history of Sony. I have a love-hate relationship with Sony - I love some of their products, but their vision is often misguided.

Props to YouTube for launching auto-captioning. That's an insanely awesome technology.

The Core i7 6-core Gulftown processor is finally out and I actually enjoyed reading this review. It's a fairly technical review, but it sounds like a great architecture.

The FCC has released a very capable tool for measuring your Internet speed with the added bonus that they can use your data point to help understand the status of broadband Internet speeds across the country. In addition to just down and up speeds, it even gives you latency! The URL is easy to memorize: braodband.gov.

Torrents are now legally available of free music from SXSW 2010. Check them out!

Popular Science has opened up the entirety of its 137-year archive for free!

I'm a big fan of these free, troubleshooting tools for Windows. If you only download one, definitely get the Blue Screen View one. My next vote is for WinDirStat, which is an application I've needed for years.

Last, but certainly not least, College Humor has a great video on the true use case of Google Wave: cyber sex.

How to Survive a Trip to India

Introduction

I'm afraid that I don't have time to put together a full post this week. I was out of town all weekend on a mini-vacation and, aside from catching up on chores since getting back I've also been setting up a new computer. I finally upgraded to Windows 7 with great 16" Asus laptop and I'm loving it! The keyboard is much easier to type on, it has HDMI out, and it can actually handle multi-tasking. You'd think a Core 2 Duo would be enough for that but somehow my HP Pavillion laptop never understood that concept and would only reliably handle one thing at a time. Even though I've used Windows 7 before this I have to admit that this was an even smoother user experience migration than I expected. I don't get the opportunity that often to give props to Microsoft so I have to give it up now: great job on the robustness. I love compatibility mode so that my old applications can run even if they're not quite compatible with Windows 7 by default. I feel like the instability of one application now is not going to crash my system anymore, either. The combination of this new hardware and Windows 7 is really going to make it a lot easier for me to blog without spending long amounts of time waiting or having to restart my computer.

Anyway, to replace my normal post I thought I'd post a speech I prepared last week for Toastmasters regarding my recent trip to India. I'll be back next week with a normal post. Until then, I hope you enjoy my speech!

Surviving a Trip to India

My heritage is Indian, and yet my recent trip to India made it quite clear that I’m culturally very much an American. I’ve been spoiled by Western luxuries like clean, running water and toilet paper that doesn’t feel like sandpaper. I went to India, for the second time of my life, on vacation in January with my brother, his wife, her sister, and a friend of ours. What we discovered that India is an incredible country where a rich culture meets modern society, which means that you’ll look out of one side of your cab to see a guy on his smartphone and out the other side to see a cow stuck in traffic. But I still haven’t said a single word about the abundance of affordable, exquisite food. I stand before you today to encourage all of you to consider making a trip to India yourselves, and there are a number of things I learned during the course of my trip that I wish I had known before I left SeaTac. Since my time with you today is limited, I’m going to cover what I consider to be the big ones to help you survive your trip and understand some of the local customs.

As your high school shop teacher probably once said: safety first. You should check the Center for Disease Control, or the CDC, website for what immunizations they recommend and get them taken care of at least a month before your trip. They actually have a list of travel clinics on their site, and the easiest thing to do is to give your closest one a call and set up an appointment. They’ll usually charge you a nominal fee for the consultation and set you up with everything you need, some of which may be covered by insurance. I actually ended up getting a stomach parasite on my trip and was so glad I had visited a travel clinic and gotten the medication I needed in advance. The pharmacists, or chemists, you find in India often aren’t very well-educated and have no qualms about giving you prescription medication over-the-counter. So if you visit one and come back to America with hair growing on your palms, you’ll know why. In addition to seeing your travel clinic, be sure to stock up on pain relievers, fever reducers, and antacids, at the very least.
One of the other shockers we encountered there is that public bathrooms rarely have soap in them. The pollution can get pretty heavy in the big cities and in your sightseeing and shopping, you’re bound to get your hands dirty, so be sure to bring plenty of hand sanitizer and moist towelettes to use before and after your meals, and, of course, bathroom runs.

Speaking of food, make sure you only eat at clean restaurants. Avoid getting food on the side of the road. When you see a guy wipe his nose with the same hand he uses to make your Bombay Burger, you’ll quickly lose your appetite. There is no Health Department in India, so you’re on your own. No matter where you eat though, definitely don’t drink the tap water. Unlike America where our water is processed assuming that it will be consumed, Indian water isn’t really filtered and only the most iron clad stomachs can handle it. Bottled water isn’t that expensive, so buy and drink plenty of it. Dehydration isn’t uncommon for travelers, especially in the South where it’s hot year-round. Another reason you’ll want bottled water is for brushing your teeth - some travelers get sick from brushing with tap water.

For your day-to-day expenses, you’ll need plenty of cash. In a country with over a billion people and fraught with small towns and villages, it’s not too hard to understand why credit cards are unpopular. I recommend using a money belt so that you don’t risk getting pick-pocketed. Additionally, I discovered why frugality runs in my family. It turns out that Indians are used to bargaining for literally everything - from meals to clothes to hotel rooms. Even being brown I was immediately recognized as an American by everyone and so the prices pitched to me were always ridiculous by Indian standards. You’ll get better and better at reading how low someone is willing to go on a price as you shop, but don’t be afraid to walk away because they’ll often end up ceding to you. If you’re traveling with friends then you can almost always get great bargains by buying multiple things – kind of like shopping at Costco but without the free samples. Unless you see the words “fixed price”, just assume that you can bargain.

Prices aren’t just cheaper there for tourist trinkets and food though, domestic travel is also much cheaper. Trying to drive around there yourself is like trying to drive on I-5 blindfolded – it’s just not a good plan. We were able to get a driver for a van for less than $40 a day. If you take a rickshaw, the vehicle of choice in Mumbai, you can expect to pay about $1 for a 30-minute trip across town. Of course, being in a rickshaw has the added bonus of letting you see your life flash before your eyes numerous times as your driver weaves in between lanes and gets within a couple of inches of huge trucks.

While I recognize that some of my tips may have been a bit intense I hope that I haven’t discouraged you from considering a vacation in India. It’s a great break from the cold in the winter, many people there understand English, you’ll discover the most delicious food you’ve never eaten, like vada pav, and there’s great beauty to be explored all around, such as a marble Bahai temple shaped as a lotus flower. There are some more common sense things you can do to prepare for your trip, like getting a visa, packing sunscreen, and bringing extra toilet paper, but I think I’ve given you the bare minimum in order for you to make it back home in one piece. You can [post a comment] if you’d like to learn even more about traveling to one of the most amazing and unique countries in the world.

Apple Becomes Your Mom

Apple Removes "Sexy" Apps

Apple has finally done it: they've become like a concerned mother wagging their finger at you. Last week, they took down hundreds of apps that satisfy more prurient interests. Yes, unfortunately, this was the biggest story last week. Call it a post-MWC funk.

Anyway, I really hate to harp on Apple about the iPhone app store, but every once in a while I think they need an "I told you so". I don't mean an "I told you so" that the app store would be unsuccessful - it's obviously doing gangbusters. Rather, a lot of tech journalists pointed out that censorship is a very slippery slope. Once you start policing what can be done on the devices you sell, you open a Padora's box of customer concerns and developer frustration. This latest app store bust is pretty crazy - even the biggest iPhone lovers have to agree. When you're literally kicking apps out because they have pictures of figure skaters in them, you're taking it too far. What's worse is when you kick out the little guys, like Suicide Girls, and instead preserve Playboy and Sports Illustrated. Now, Apple is not taking a stand for morality or against objectifying women, they're instead making a token concession while implicitly supporting Playboy. Yes, that seems crazy, but it's basically what they're doing. When you establish hard rules of what you're going to throw out of the store and then let someone off the hook who clearly breaks those rules it's a big contradiction.

Why did Apple do this? Apparently, they were getting too many customer complaints from concerned parents and women, in general. Apple already ceded a while ago by allowing you to restrict a phone to not be able to download mature apps, but you can still see them when you browse the app store. I think that was a valid concession (albeit, somewhat silly since it's not like there's already half-naked women all over TV and the Internet for curious teenagers). This censorship is just another reminder that Apple literally holds the incomes of more than a few mobile development shops in their hands. It's a lot of power when you consider how popular the app store has become. It's really unfortunate that they're being so irresponsible with it. If they had removed Playboy and Sports Illustrated then that would be more understandable, but Apple is basically showing that there are no rules in the app store other than the rules they make up depending on who you are and how much money you bring them. They can do this as long as Android, Palm, and Blackberry stay in the backseat, but I really hope that competition from Android helps them come to their senses. Between that story and the one on child labor at some of their factories, I feel really bad for Apple PR.

The Other Smartphones

I do have some news on your other favorite smartphone competitors.

Microsoft is actually putting some effort into courting developers with Windows Phone 7, which is something they've done a terrible job of with previous versions of Windows Mobile. Right now, they're working with hardware manufacturers to get some unity across different Windows Phone 7 devices (a big issue with previous Windows Mobile devices), but there's still no details yet on the development kit. Surely, Microsoft understands that this platform is dead in the water if they can't attract mobile developers, so we'll see what they do in the months to come. At the Engadget Show last week, an LG Windows Phone 7 device was actually spotted, but it doesn't seem all that exciting. Just another smartphone until we see more of it.



For the two of you out there interested in webOS: version 1.4 came out over the weekend bringing a number of welcome improvements including video recording (and editing), huge compatibility improvements in the browser, a much improved way to start apps to promote multi-tasking, and blinking light notification on the gesture area. Now that webOS 1.4 is out, Flash 10.1 beta is just around the corner as 1.4 has changes necessary to support it, which will make the Pre and Pixi (and, of course, their Verizon counterparts) among the first phones to support Flash. This has been one of the biggest updates to webOS since the Pre's launch, but it doesn't matter unless Palm starts pimping out these features in their ads.

If you think that the iPhone leads the smartphone market, then think again. I believe that graph reflects worldwide revenues, which is why Nokia is so big even though it's a struggle to spot a Nokia phone when you walk down the street. I know Nokias are big in India because I remember wondering when I was there how people could tolerate such terrible UIs. Nokia has even had better sales growth that Apple, who was actually 3rd behind RIM. I wish the graphic would've included webOS and Android, even if their combined market share is smaller than HTC (I hope that it isn't).

Google Hacker Discovered

The source of the attacks on Google from January has been discovered to be a Chinese security consultant. The attacks were cleverly disguised as coming from the IP addresses of a trade school, which doesn't prove anything given that they could easily have been part of a botnet. The government is believe to have leveraged this consultant's code to conduct the attack, but China still denies involvement.

This same guy may have been part of an attack on Intel that occurred around the same time. This theory hasn't been proved yet, but given the nature of the circumstances, it's likely that the attacks were related. Apparently, Intel and Google were two of 34 companies that were attacked around the same time, so this thing was a pretty big deal. Intel is remaining pretty mum on what damage the attack did, which could mean that serious secrets were leaked.

Unrelated to the January attacks, a major phishing exploit hit Twitter last week by way of direct messages. It asks if a given link is you, and when you click through it uses your account to send a similar message to 10 other people. It's not clear whether or not your login credentials are leaked in the process to send out future spam, but given that people are being advised to change their password if they've clicked through I'd bet that whatever else happens on click-through is not good.

Quickies

I'm almost falling asleep here while typing so it's time to wrap up.

Ars Technica did a really great investigation of why most of the US doesn't have 100 Mbps internet connections. I wish I had more time to talk about it, but it's definitely worth a read.

3 Google executives were convicted for failing to comply with Italian privacy laws in a case where Google Video allowed a video to be uploaded of an autistic kid being bullied. This case has definitely gone too far and Google feels pretty sore about it.

Sony, Samsung, LG, Hitachi, and Toshiba have been accused by a small electronics store of price fixing on optical disc drives. Apparently, this sort of stuff isn't that uncommon in the East so these charges may have some merit behind them.

Amazon was the most trusted brand of 2009 (according to market research company Millward Brown)! Amazon actually sells about half the other brands on that list and ships merchandise through two of them.

UT Austin made Network World's list of the nation's 10 hottest computer science schools! Hook 'em!

The winners of the Engadget Awards have been announced with the PS3 and Droid aimpressively going home with two awards apiece. It was kind of interesting that the editors thought the Nuvifone was the worst device of the year whereas everyone else was more let down by the 3G Shuffle.

Have a great first week of March, everyone!

Windows Phone 7: It's About Time

A Windows Mobile OS You Might Actually Want

Over the past 7 or so years, Microsoft has carefully dragged the Windows Mobile brand in the mud. Of course, it started out as Pocket PC, but some of us would much rather forget those days. In any case, WinMo has had a lot of issues over the years and got pummeled by Blackberry and Apple in market share because Microsoft simply wasn't being competitive enough in innovation. As such, rumors of a Zune Phone have been around since the Zune hit the market and created a small fan base. While those rumors never quite materialized, out of their ashes has emerged Windows Phone 7, which is more or less a re-branding of Windows Mobile.



I recommend watching the videos that Engadget has posted from the announcement last week because seeing is really believing here - this UI is slick. It very much feels inspired by the same design principles that inspired the Zune, but it's still set apart a bit from the Zune UI in that it clearly looks more geared towards a mobile PC experience. It's visually dominated by clean typography and screens that seem to be horizontally very long to encourage side-to-side navigation. It also aims to plug you into the Internet more easily and automagically kind of like the live widgets familiar to Android users.

While there's no Flash support, it's gotten at least as much good press as the iPad has gotten bad press. I like Gizmodo's wording of the UI as being "function-centric". It's not centered around screens of apps, just a simple interface for exactly what you care about. Despite all this buzz though, I don't know if Microsoft will succeed here. Palm made a big splash around this time last year with webOS and Palm is arguable a more respected name in mobile phones than Microsoft. They released the Pre in the summer and they're still struggling despite critical acclaim for the Pre and Pixi. Microsoft's timeline is this winter, so do they stand a chance in a world where 9 months can mean 1-3 major mobile OS upgrades for Android, webOS, and the iPhone?

Well, I'll admit that they have an ace in the hole: Xbox Live. The way to market phones nowadays tends to be around a specific feature that it does really well. It may do other things decently well but being the biggest player in one specific feature can really help move merchandise. The strategy with Blackberry was for enterprise users and heavy texters and for Palm with webOS it was multi-tasking. I'm sure there will be little independent games on Windows Phone 7 like on other phones, but the real killer feature here would be cross-platform gaming, which is exactly what Microsoft is proposing. Being able to play a casual game on your Xbox 360 from Xbox Live Arcade against someone on their phone is an awesome idea. I can already picture the ad of a dad on a business trip playing Bomberman on his phone from LAX against his son who's at home on their Xbox 360. Past just casual games like this though would be a concept pioneered by Sega with the Dreamcast, which was way ahead of its time. Remember those VMU thingies? Where you could play little mini-games on them? What if you could play a Mass Effect 2 mini-game on your phone that integrated with the storyline from your Xbox 360 Mass Effect 2 saved game? If I had an Xbox 360, I would most definitely buy a Windows Phone 7 for an extended experience like that. Sony has tried to bring together the PS3 with the PSP and had limited success, but it requires people to buy a gaming device whereas everyone needs a cell phone these days.

While we're still in hype mode right now with Windows Phone 7 and the videos show how unpolished it is in terms of speed and bugginess, it's a very cool concept. There's no guarantee that it'll be enough to bail out Windows Mobile, but after seeing all I've seen I really hope it ends up standing a chance.

In Other Mobile News...

Hey, it was Mobile World Congress week so last week was all cell phone news.

Nokia and Intel have teamed up to create MeeGo, a new Linux-based mobile OS designed to work on all mobile devices, not just cell phones, and is basically a re-imagining of Intel's Moblin OS. I think they basically took a good look at the iPhone and Android and decided that they were in big trouble. Given that this is all we know, it's not promising. Nokia doesn't have a great track record for clean UIs, but Intel still has the power to popularize this OS at least among netbooks and tablets and it is going to be an open source OS. The official site says that the development platform will be C++, which may make it more attractive for people used to writing Objective C for the iPhone, but C++ is definitely not as popular a language as it once was.

The HTC has named its successor to the Nexus One: Desire. It's an Android 2.1 device with the same Snapdragon processor and sports a beautiful AMOLED multi-touch screen. I can't get enough of AMOLED - it's too awesome. The main difference from the Nexus one is that the trackball is gone in favor of the Sense UI, which is HTC's UI built on top of Android that was introduced with the HTC Hero. So nothing terrible new here, but it is probably the next big Android phone.

Adobe announced that Air is slated to be available on Android later this year (I think in the first half of the year), and they stated their grand plan of developers writing applications on the Flash platform to work on all phones that don't have "iPhone" in their name. As much as Apple doesn't want to admit it, Flash is big. HTML 5 isn't here yet and everyone already uses Flash for mobile video and a lot of casual online games. I think Flash may be in trouble in 2012 when HTML 5 has hopefully caught on, but for right now it's an interesting proposition that developers can put mobile video widgets on their site via Flash that will work on a lot of non-iPhone phones. It's not going to kill Apple, but it would certainly be a thorn in its side if Flash ends up being implemented well (read: stable and power-efficient). Plus, developers could just develop some applications to just be for the iPhone OS and then for Air and that could end up covering an enormous majority of the market. Like any good conference, this is all just pie in the sky talk for right now. It won't be long before we see what happens, especially with the Pre expected to get Flash support in an OS update before the end of the week.

Why You Should be Scared of Apple

This post simply wouldn't be complete without covering this article from Cracked. It grew to be quite popular. Despite all the great things that Apple has done for technology in the past 30 years, they're riddled with problems that people like to pretend don't exist. It doesn't make you a bad person if you have an iPhone just because Apple does a lot of bad stuff, but it's worth knowing the things they do behind closed doors, like run campaigns of fear against their own employees and take extreme measures to combat leaks. When an employee of an Apple contractor commits suicide because he's being tortured over a prototype he accidentally lost, that's a really bad sign.

The real issue with Apple is the amount of control they continue to wield over their products. It's hard to cheer for someone who makes massive innovations in a technology only to cripple it with restrictions that don't make sense. The app store on the iPhone is a prime example of that, but it's not much better that they use updates for programs like iTunes to sneak other unrelated software on users' computers. I think stories like this are important to know because I believe corporations should be held accountable not only by their shareholders but by their customers. Ultimately, Apple is only around because of the people who buy their products, and their lack of regard for what customers really care about kind of sucks. It'd just be nice to see that change because they clearly have a lot of talent in Cupertino and they can really pump out some impressive hardware.

Yahoo Going the Way of Alta Vista

PC World posted a fun little editorial posing the question of whether or not Yahoo is becoming another Alta Vista. I definitely had a chuckle when I read the title because I remember trying Alta Vista back in the days when people thought Yahoo was the Internet. They're really hitting heavy stagnation when it comes to innovation and a home page that's attractive at all, and it's unfortunate to see them fall like this but they're totally being undercut by Bing. Even though Bing isn't a new player under the hood, it's very telling how quickly Microsoft was able to usurp mindshare from Yahoo.

The Rest

And now the stories I have very little to say about.

Flash 10.1 will support porn mode - I mean private browsing. You have to admit that it's kind of funny how quickly the whole "private browsing" feature has caught on.

40% of US households do not have broadband, and 38% of those people aren't interested in getting it. That's really terrible. The industry and the government clearly aren't doing a good enough job helping the Internet fit in people's lives.

Google Gears is dying in favor of HTML 5. I think everyone saw that coming as soon as they heard about HTML 5.

Maximum PC has a really good roundup of useful web applications. They're not all winners, but most of them truly are really good.

Lastly, this image very aptly sums up the truth about how annoying DVDs have become nowadays. Do the studios not watch their own DVDs? How does all that crap not irritate them?

Have a great last week of February, everyone! Oh February 2010, we hardly knew thee.

The Buzz About Google Buzz

Google's Social Foray

Be forewarned: I have to talk about a lot of Google news today. They just dominated the media last week - there's no getting around it.

At the center of it all is Google Buzz, which has clearly attracted at least the amount of attention as the iPad from the tech community. Compared to most other Google launches, except for Wave, the amount of buzz it has gotten is kind of uncharacteristic of a new Google product. I don't think it's quite the buzz that Google wanted though.

So what is Google Buzz? Simply put, it's Google's take on social networking. It's a tab in your Gmail account that lets you connect with your friends as they interact on a number of services including Twitter, Picasa, YouTube, Blogspot, Google talk, Google Reader, and Flickr. It basically gives you a feed of the people you follow ala Facebook and lets you update also kind of like on Facebook where you can say stuff or post a link or photo. You also get some finer controls on privacy. Their vision for this is a little bigger than what you see in your web browser though since you can have a Buzz layer on Google Maps to see where your friends are (I guess like Latitude but on speed?), and the mobile apps do voice recognition. If you're on webOS though you're out of luck - Google didn't show any love for Palm.

Why would you want this thing? Well, Google is selling it on the premise that it hooks into your Gmail so if you're on Gmail then you get it for free and it just gives you the stuff you care about, but I don't know how it figures out what you care about unless it strictly bases that off when you click to "like" stuff. In my opinion, it's kind of silly and unnecessary. And I'm definitely not alone in that camp. For one thing, it doesn't really add any value except for the Google Maps layer, which I can't vouch for and is something you can kind of already do with Latitude and Foursquare. I can understand that Google doesn't want to get left in the dust with social networking (as they've already shown with domestic failures Orkut and Dodgeball), but this isn't really great timing for it. My running opinion of technology is that it should solve a problem or fill a need, but I don't think this does either.

To make matters worse, there have been serious privacy concerns called to attention. For example, the default when it launched was that the people you followed was public and you were auto-following a bunch of people from your Gmail contact list, so this was basically revealing part of your address book to the world. They've fixed that, but as CNet aptly puts it, using Buzz is still kind of awkward and not compelling.

The most insightful thoughts on Buzz though, in my opinion, have come from Digg co-founder and Internet celebrity Kevin Rose. In a nutshell, he believes part of the intent of Google Buzz is to hook directly into Google Search and provide real-time relevancy for up-and-coming sites and news articles. While Digg already does a great job of people-driven news promotion, Google Buzz is a wider base, is intended to be as easy to interact with as Twitter, and provides data that other sites can farm to improve what they do, assuming your feed on Buzz is public. This theory is actually further supported but Google's acquisition of social search service Aardvark, which lets you pose natural questions to real people in your social network so you can get real answers instead of having to search for information yourself. In the end, it all ends in beefing up Google Search. Of course, that's just one theory though.

I don't think it's fair to write off Google Buzz already. It's not that exciting right now, but this is Google we're talking about. They tend to not settle for developing mediocre products. Plus, sometimes these things just take a while to catch on. Facebook and Twitter didn't get so big overnight.

Google Broadband

While we're talking about Google let's move on to something that's actually much cooler than Buzz. They're planning on building an ultra high speed broadband network with speeds up to 1Gbps (which is probably 150x faster than what you have right now) at competitive prices. I'm totally salivating at this idea. They're only going to test it out in a few markets to start out with for 50,000 to 500,000 people. Google claims that their interest in doing this is to test out applications that would need lots of bandwidth to perform well. Still no idea what markets they're looking into, but this is the kind of competition we really need in the broadband market. Verizon is the only company out there really pushing the envelope on a large scale and it's all kinds of exciting that Google is taking an interest simply because they have enough resources to actually compete. Even if they end up canning the program, if they get Comcast and Time Warner to wake up and try to provide better products then it'll be a success in and of itself.

Is Google Killing Startups?

This is a really interesting story that I'm really at odds with. Business Insider has an editorial up claiming that every engineer Google snatches up is a missed opportunity for a startup. They would probably include a couple of other companies hypothetically, but the most obvious example is Google. Ultimately, the security blanket of these larger companies is bringing in top talent rather than a market where people have to be entrepreneurs and create their own jobs.

The thing is, most startups don't succeed. It's an extremely risky venture and I vehemently protest that idea that any developer has the chops to start their own company. It's like when the government said that anyone is entitled to a house even if they can't afford it. Starting a company is hard work and requires a certain type of person, and not every developer that goes to Google has that even though they're really smart and work great as a cog in a much larger machine. I love that the US is a place that encourages entrepreneurial spirit and I'm not disputing the value of startups at all, but I don't think Google is killing them. I've heard plenty of stories of people leaving places like Google and Microsoft to start their own company. The experience they got in a larger company ends up being invaluable to their venture. Not everyone can come out of school and go straight into creating a startup because not everyone is Bill Gates or Steve Jobs, but more people definitely can after being in the industry for a while and learning from the brilliant people out there, who have tremendous influence on the industry by impacting these individuals at places like Google.

If you want to blame anyone blame our country's educational system for its failings in properly promoting science and technology, and cutting back on scholarships. I don't know who this guy has been talking to, but the talent pool is definitely limited out there compared to the positions available within computer science. I do think it makes sense, however, having entrepreneurs go to schools and teach them about starting a company so that they have that option, but I don't think it's productive to call Google the bad guy in this situation.

Google Stands Up to Australian Censorship

See? I told you it was a ton of Google news. It happens sometimes.

Let me sneak in an only slightly related piece of YouTube news: they've created a safety mode to help filter out objectionable content, presumably so YouTube can be whitelisted for educational uses and even children's use at home (or adults' use in the office).

The real provocative story is that Google is refusing requests for censorship on YouTube from the Australian government. This may be part of the motivation behind their threat to pull out of China: their censorship cessions have opened a Pandora's box of requests for them to censor elsewhere. What you really have to consider is what an impact Google can make in these countries. I'm not a Google fanboy, mind you, but I think they could have the power to change things in some of these countries. Right now, the requests that the Australian government are making are due to their self-interest rather than law, and Google has pledged to abide by the laws in the countries it's in. If Australia decides to change their law and Google refuses, what happens? If Google pulls out, will people get really upset and question their government's censorship? I'd hope so, but it's a hard thing to measure.

The Last Bits

What a terrible pun. Wow. Anyway, just a few quick stories before I sign off and get back to playing some guitar - my V-day treat to me.

A new Russian crimeware called Spy Eye has an option to remove competitor Zeus software from the users machine, along with stealing banking credentials. The intent of the program is to create Trojan horses so the person who installed it had it coming, but just a funny way to try to kill off a rival.

AOL has integrated Facebook Chat with AIM. Do people really use Facebook Chat on a regular basis?

Google Maps has added 9 new experimental features including rotatable maps and aerial imagery. Very nifty stuff!

The founder of 4chan, the least well-known gigantic cultural influence in the world, spoke at TED. Very interesting talk about privacy.

Google Street View did Whistler! Check out this sucker:



Have a great week everyone!

Gone Phishing on the iPhone

Cybersecurity Shmybersecurity

There was a pretty good amount of security news last week but not much of anything else. Given that I'm kind of tired from yesterday (worked all day and night), I'm going to keep this kind of short since it was a slow news week anyway.

Network World kind of informally posted what they think the 10 best IT jobs will be in 2010. I don't know that they had hard evidence to back their list, but it's actually a pretty good list. Guess what's at the top of that list? No, not a shmybersecurity expert but a security specialist. The list has some other cool choices, like open source evangelist and service assurance manager (super important), but let's stick with security specialist.

Almost every week for the past several months I've had at least one security issue a week to talk about. Sometimes I don't cover them just because they get repetitive. Last week alone there were two biggies. Google was at the center of a corporate espionage attack a couple of weeks ago and so last week they teamed up with the NSA to get to the bottom of the attack, which is believed to have originated in China. It was so serious that Google decided that they're not going to filter search results in China anymore. I'm not sure if they've stuck with this policy or not since then, but they were clearly frazzled by this. Given that the accounts violated were active human rights supporters in China, it's very likely that the attacks originated within the Chinese government.

More recent than that was that a security flaw was discovered in the iPhone opening the door to phishing attacks. I wonder if this will make security on the iPhone a big deal like it is for Internet Explorer on PCs? It basically allows someone to easily modify your mobile configuration files over the air and make it look like it came from Apple. Someone who didn't know about this exploit could do something like connect to a malicious server instead of a VPN and have all their transmissions compromised.

With all these stories cropping up, it's not surprising that a security specialist would be in demand. Coming full circle back to this section header, a lot of people don't understand cybersecurity at all. However, it's not easy to understand if you want to be safe from every kind of attack you're likely to come across. Even the tech savvy get tricked. It's an arms race because the bad guys get more and more clever as we figure them out - like a polymorphic virus. I don't know if it will pan out since often things don't in a government as complicated as ours, but the House has approved legislation to authorize the NIST to develop a cybersecurity education program. This would be not only for the government but also for businesses and consumers to make our economy stronger against security scares. I hope that it ends up leading to real results, because it's something that we've needed for a long time now.

Superbowl Ads

Internet video has gotten really big. It's exciting. I remember blogging about IP TV a few years back and looking forward to a future where people control what they watch and have a much larger platform of content in the Internet. We're not quite there yet, but it's promising that 178 million US Internet users watched 33 billion online videos in December. It's crazy that 40% of those videos were on YouTube and 3% was on Hulu, which was the next highest percentage. The times have really changed from a world where the Internet wasn't a big deal and no one was using much of their bandwidth unless they were pirating stuff.

Anyway, it's cool that I could turn to Hulu for Superbowl ads since I missed the game. A couple of my friends had planned on doing that since they don't like football (I know, blasphemy). Hulu did this last year, too, but I think they improved this year with showing you how much people liked each video (at least I think that's new). I had the game on in the background and actually managed to catch the really good ads live because they happened to catch my attention. My favorites were definitely the eTrade one, the Doritos House Rules one, and the Megan Fox one. Honorable mentions though to Snickers and the Doritos Underdog one. Jeers to Prince of Persia (stop embarrassing good video game franchises, please) and The Backup Plan. Am I crazy or were the movie trailers last Superbowl much better? This year also saw Google's first Superbowl ad, and it was creative.

Let eBooks Grow

I don't want to talk to this too much since I have a vested interest in Amazon (I assure you that I have 0 insider knowledge on this thing), but I have something to say.

A part of me is stupefied by how book publishers are dealing with eBooks, but a part of me is glad because it's exposing them for the inane people they are. Amazon is selling eBooks from HarperCollins, for example, for less they pay HarperCollins and now Rupert Murdoch is bemoaning the death of paper books and wants to force prices of eBooks up like Macmillan does. When is this guy going to retire? He's so out-of-date he probably etches his notes on stone tablets. This is the same guy who didn't want Google indexing his news articles, mind you, because he can't see the writing on the wall. Book publishers have gotten away with over-charging people for books and under-paying authors for too long and these arguments with Amazon are only surfacing how shady they can be. I don't understand what's so wrong with trying to sell eBooks for less money than a physical version. It's all profit as a digital copy! First they didn't want a computerized voice reading their books on the Kindle, and now Amazon is offering them a better revenue split at the $10 price point but they're still recalcitrant! Whether they like it or not, paper books as we know them aren't going to last forever. I know you're clutching your copy of Catcher in the Rye and staring blankly at the screen but it's true! We don't even live in a world anymore where everyone reads newspapers on paper.

Ok, stepping off my soapbox. Thanks for indulging me.

Last Notes

Just a couple of items before I sign off here.

This is a really fun article about 18 gadgets that used to be high-tech. It's so enlightening sometimes to think about the past and how far we've come and how we got here.

The CEO of Sun resigned following the heels of their acquisition by Oracle. Kind of sad that Sun has fallen so far from grace, but it happens. At least he resigned in style via haiku.

Are relational databases dying? Very interesting thoughts from Computer World.

Enjoy the sunny weather outside while you can! I'll see you next week. Same bat time, same bat channel.

The Apple iPlop

The iPad

I don't know how many years it's been since we've had rumors of an Apple tablet. When people saw the Modbook - OS X running on external tablet hardware - I think that really fueled the fire. I never really thought it'd be more than a giant iPhone given how much Apple had invested in the iPhone, and it looks like I was right. Instead of a Mac-based tablet we got an iPad. Engadget did their normal great job of liveblogging the whole event, but it was all about the iPad. It's funny because when you look through the pictures and read about the iPad it actually sounds pretty good. I'm sure seeing Steve Jobs demo it made it even more enticing. However, it's not long afterwards that you start to realize what's wrong with it.



In case you've been living under a rock: the iPad is literally almost just a big iPhone at about 9.5" x 7.5". It can do everything an iPhone can, other than make calls (or send texts), take pictures, or take videos, but it can show you eBooks natively, comes with iWork, and supports painting. Some of the other native apps are a bit varied from what you'd see on the iPhone but just to take advantage of the larger size. I don't think it's bad at anything that it does, but at $500 it's too expensive for the need people don't have for it. It's more or less a toy device for people who already have an iPhone since it's limited by the Apple App Store. You can see some videos of it in action here.

I figured that everyone else would be drooling over it, but not so much. At least not among the tech journalists. I think it's a neat niche product that will sell a few units, but it won't be a smash hit with this many people disappointed almost to the point of being offended by it. It has plenty of things wrong with it. It's locked to the Apple App Store, there's no HDMI, still no support for Flash (supposedly because it's buggy), and you can't really multitask. On the plus side, it's fast and it does has affordable data plans starting at $30 a month. Oddly enough, they partnered with AT&T again for the data service, which may be just that AT&T gave them the best deal. Plus, AT&T has a more widespread WiFi network than Verizon.

I wonder if this will end up being the nail in the coffin for the tablet PC? It's a niche market that has never taken off and maybe it's a product that's cooler to think about than actually develop? Or maybe it's still ahead of its time? If there was an iPod or iPhone of tablets though, I don't think anyone is going to look back on he iPad and consider it that thing. I think if it was $300 cheaper it would be a really awesome device, but at $500 it keeps it out of reach of the average person. We'll have to see when it comes out if people forget its negatives and buy it anyway. Until then, if you watch one parody video you should definitely watch College Humor's.

CES 2010

I missed out on CES being in India, but if you missed out also then it's never too late to catch up. I don't think there was a lot of really impressive stuff, but Robert Scoble put up a pretty impressive roundup of the biggest articles around CES. One of the more high profile announcements was Microsoft's tablet, which was seen as a flop, as well. Microsoft keeps trying to build tablets without carefully thinking about what the user interface should be like.

The coolest thing I saw was the Palm Pre Plus and Pixi Plus coming to Verizon (just a week ago, actually), which feature tethering in addition to more RAM and more on-board flash memory. With the new webOS coming out next month though all Pres and Pixis will get video recording, video editing, and Flash support. This will either support Apple's criticism of Flash or debunk them. The new webOS update is coming later this month.

Apps on the Kindle

Amazon recently announced an SDK for the Kindle to allow for third-party apps on the Kindle. Some people have criticized the Kindle as being a one-trick pony (even though it does do that one trick very well), so this touches on that a bit. I think it'll be neat for really simple applications, like word games and restaurant guides and stuff. It's not the reason you'd get a Kindle, but I'd file it away in the "nice to have" category.

Firefox 3.6

We now have Firefox 3.6, which has HTML 5 support, form auto-completion (like entire forms, not just individual fields), personas, and significant performance improvements. It's still not at Chrome's level yet, but I'm glad that they're at least trying to close the gap.

Ready for 3-D?

Digital Trends put up an article that I wanted to talk about because it's an issue that keeps coming up: do we really need 3-D TVs? Will they sell? Well, as I understand it, it's not very expensive to add to TVs (at least the kind where you need to put on 3-D glasses) but helps drive sales to buying new TVs for folks who don't have high definition yet and just needed that one more reason to upgrade. In reality, it'll still be at least another couple of years before people actually seek out 3-D TVs. The content just isn't there, which I think makes sense. Why invest in 3-D content if no one can view it? That would be like creating a bunch of HD channels when no one has an HD TV. HD TVs didn't make a whole lot of sense when they first came out but it wasn't long before they did become useful. I think we'll see the same with 3-D, we just haven't reached the point yet where it's really desirable.

Quickies

I'm surprisingly exhausted so I need to end this post rather quickly and pass out. Here's some quick last notes.

Secretary of State Hilary Clinton (still weird to say that) is taking a hard stance for cybersecurity and the free flow of information. This supports Google's decision to stop censoring their Chinese site and tries to combat censorship in other countries as well. It may be a little overreaching, but it is important for the portion that seeks to punish those who do hack the United States military.

Samsung threw its hat in the e-Reader game. It doesn't impress me, but it's just YAER (yet another e-reader).

After a long courtship, Oracle now owns Sun, he creators of Java among other things. In other news, Oracle is slowly taking over the world (it wasn't long ago that they acquired Linksys).

If you want to know how secure the identity of your browser is, this is a really cool tool to find out.

Have a great week, everyone!