FTC Worries About Consumers, Cloud Data, and Privacy
This is real, and not enough people are paying attention. Add to the passage below Google’s DNS service and their desktop apps and browser control, then all the information spilling out onto Flickr, Twitter, and Facebook (Facebook being in direct competition for control with Google) and one begins to see the inevitable.
Science Fiction has long prided itself on warning of “big brother’s” impending arrival and how the Government would create the all-seeing, all-knowing surveillance system that would enslave us all, and yet it has not only failed to predict that we would be willing participants in building it, but that the very Science Fiction fans it catered to would be at the forefront of this participation.
We’re giving away our privacy and our freedom, one “free convenience” at a time.
From Slashdot:
“Ars Techina has a nice article about the FTC’s concern that consumers don’t understand the implications of storing their data in the cloud. From the article: ‘Data is now sitting on servers outside of your control, where it can be accessed far more easily by Google itself, hackers, and law enforcement than it ever could if kept within the device. Once data passes over the network, it gets much easier to access in realtime; once it is stored on a remote server, it gets much easier to access at any time. And those are just the phone settings. Google also has access to search history data, anything stored in Google Docs or Spreadsheets, complete schedules stored in Google Calendar, and recent Maps searches. Combine them all, and companies like Google become one-stop shops for authorities looking for personal information.’ Do you think the average consumer even has a clue about this issue?”
Where have all the desktops gone?
So, as I write this, I’m fresh off my first experience with Google Wave.
For those of you who haven’t tried it yet, the tip of the iceberg is summed up by:
google_wave = (email + im + web) * ticket_system
The death of e-mail has been predicted for many, many years and it still hasn’t happened. As antiquated as e-mail is, the format is a winner for its structure and it’s credibility. Everyone saves e-mails to cover themselves — the e-mail itself contains past conversations, a subject that can be followed, a clear list of multiple participants, important attachments, and a precise date & time.
The reality today is that new mediums of conversation have sprung up everywhere, and conversations are no longer limited to e-mail and phone calls, they now intertwine with instant messages and tweets, they relate to blog posts, videos, Flickr streams — the list is becoming endless. But the conversations are disjointed, there’s no way to follow a conversation across mediums. Several start-ups have attempted to highlight and address this issue, but the very nature of the Internet is changing faster than most can adapt. Most, by the way, does not include Google.
Enter Google Wave.
While people have been bickering about what Open Source desktop they can “really” live with, and following the latest shenanigans in the commercial desktop war, Google has been busy doing the real work and has finally updated our decades old e-mail.
Wave has the potential to eventually include all current and future streams of communication and to relate them all through a single “live” wave. And that will surely include VoIP (and converted-to-text VoIP conversations) and video conferences which will finally close the last of the original open loops.
I took a look today at what I run off my local desktop on a regular basis. With the exception of my video editors, photography, and graphics software, everything else could be run online — and in fact most are used to communicate online anyways.
Gamers, photographers, and videographers will most likely continue to push the desktop market for some time to come, but we may see the less privacy-inclined disappear from the traditional desktop all-together in the near future. If, or when, Google decides to attack the needs of the private cloud, the rest of us may go too.
Resistance, it would seem, is futile.
Xserve Server Admin Tools 10.6
For anyone curious as to why their Xserve Server Admin Tools disappeared when they upgraded from OS X 10.5 to OS X 10.6, it’s because the 10.5 version is no longer compatible with OS X 10.6 and the software is automatically uninstalled during the upgrade.
Visit the Apple website to grab your copy of Server Admin Tools 10.6.
Mac’s New Remote Connection
Since the upgrade to Snow Leopard the default behaviour of Mac’s New Remote Connection is no longer SSH (Automatic) it is SSH Protocol 1, which is absolutely ridiculous. Having the default behaviour of New Remote Connections as anything but SSH Protocol 2 makes no sense at all.
In order to circumvent this behaviour, simply modify your saved server connections and append “-2″ at the end of each entry.
New Remote Connection will automatically add a “-1″ at the beginning of your connection command, but luckily the second SSH Protocol parameter “-2″ takes precedence over the first.
Old connection:
username@server.com
Resulting in:
ssh -1 username@server.com
New connection:
username@server.com -2
Resulting in:
ssh -1 username@server.com -2
With the change in place to each entry, your saved connections will all now default to SSH Protocol 2.
Google Apps Standard vs Premier
The is no escaping questions about Google Apps for business these days. Every business owner wants to cut costs and stick with the familiar. Much in the way Microsoft used home domination to assimilate the office, Google is following in its footsteps and leveraging personal GMail use to begin its run on corporate e-mail hosting.
Here’s a comparison of Google Apps Standard vs Google Apps Premier.
| Premier Edition | Standard Edition | |
| Price | $50 / user / year | Free (Ad-supported) |
| Messaging Application Features | ||
| Gmail and Google Calendar | Yes | Yes |
| Gmail Storage | 25 GB / user | 7.3 GB / user |
| 99.9% Gmail uptime guarantee | Yes | |
| Gmail ads can be disabled | Yes | |
| Email Security, powered by Postini | Yes | |
| Email Archiving, powered by Postini | 90 days message recovery, can be extended | |
| Resource scheduling in Google Calendar | Yes | |
| SSL enforcement for secure HTTPS access | Yes | |
| Collaboration Application Features | ||
| Google Docs and Google Sites | Yes | Yes |
| Google Sites Storage | 10 GB plus 500 MB per user for shared storage | 10 GB for shared storage |
| Google Video for private, secure video sharing | Yes | |
| SSL Enforcement for secure HTTPS access | Yes | |
| Support | ||
| Self-service online support | Yes | Yes |
| Email Support | Yes | |
| Phone support for critical issues | Yes | |
| Integration Capabilities | ||
| Single Sign-on API, read more. | Yes | |
| User provisioning API | Yes | |
| Email migration tools and API | Yes | |
| Email routing and email gateway support | Yes |
It’s basically $4.17/month/mailbox for Google Premier.
32-bit vs 64-bit Mac & Snow Leopard
(Note: This is all based on Developper release 10A432 and is yet to be confirmed in the final release.)
If you’re upgrading your MAC OS to Snow Leopard (only $35 CAD) you should be looking to ensure you’re running the 64-bit version (although Apple claim users won’t notice the difference — and furthermore it would appear that Snow Leopard runs 64-bit applications regardless of how it booted).
Your first step is to determine if your processor is 64-bit capable or not. You must have the 64-bit EFI. Here’s the chart from Apple:
| Processor Name | 32- or 64-bit |
| Intel Core Solo | 32 bit |
| Intel Core Duo | 32 bit |
| Intel Core 2 Duo | 64 bit |
| Intel Quad-Core Xeon | 64 bit |
Once you’ve determined if you’re 64-bit capable, you apparently need to hold down the 6 and the 4 simultaneously on a standard Mac at boot up to force the installation into 64-bit mode, otherwise your Snow Leopard will install in 32-bit mode by default. Also see the com.apple.Boot.plist file for permanent changes.
I’ve searched support on Apple and only confirmed this in Snow Leopard Server.
The Twitpocalypse
So it would appear that Twitter has been the victim of a Y2K like scenario.
The unique identifier assigned to each tweet has exceeded 2,147,483,647. The result is that some Twitter related apps will begin seeing negative numbers. The problem is the use of a 32-bit signed integer for the status ID.
It would appear that the Twitter engineering team accelerated the process in order to deal with the issue during the day, instead of at 3am.
If your individual app is affected, a patch will likely be released soon. I use Twitteriffic on my iPod Touch and overflow broke the app.
Bandwidth vs. Monthly Transfer
There are a lot of promotions going on right now and this usually highlights the lack of understanding of the relationship between the bandwidth a host provides you and the amount of traffic you can actually transfer on that connection.
For example, if you are sold a 10 Mbps connection from an ISP or datacenter, the absolute theoretical maximum amount of data that you can transfer in one direction, in one month, is just over 3 TB. If you upload and download at full speed all month long, the most you can use is 6 TB (combined upload and download).
So if you’re being offered 5 TB of traffic on a 10 Mbps connection, and a huge portion of your traffic is downloads from your site, you’ll never get more than 3 TB of use out of that link.
Here’s the full run-down (in one direction, not synchronous, approximated):
1 Mbps = 320 GB/month
2 Mbps = 642 GB/month
3 Mbps = 963 GB/month
4 Mbps = 1.3 TB/month
5 Mbps = 1.6 TB/month
6 Mbps = 1.9 TB/month
7 Mbps = 2.2 TB/month
8 Mbps = 2.5 TB/month
9 Mbps = 2.8 TB/month
10 Mbps = 3.2 TB/month
15 Mbps = 4.7 TB/month
20 Mbps = 6.3 TB/month
25 Mbps = 8 TB/month
50 Mbps = 16 TB/month
75 Mbps = 24 TB/month
100 Mbps = 32 TB/month
SyncManager for Mac USB Issues
If you use a Mac and a Blackberry from RIM then you need PocketMac SyncManager 4.1 to synchronize your Mac (native Mac apps, or Microsoft Office apps) with your Blackberry.
Recent changes have caused the SyncManager to no longer detect devices.
You need to visit the Blackberry site to download the USB driver update patch. A reboot will be required after the install.
*** IMPORTANT ***
If you add a password to your Blackberry (which I recently did) you will find that the SyncManager does not detect your Blackberry. This is not a USB driver issue, it’s a password issue.
Launch the SyncManager, go to the last tab “Connection” and select “My Blackberry handheld requires a password for use.” then restart the SyncManager.
Validate Your CSS
For personal projects I’m getting back into web design and brushing up on my CSS as well as learning PHP (which in the end is pretty similar to other languages I already know). When I left web design CSS was just being introduced and was more of a novelty, now it seems that CSS is 90% of the site!
The W3C has a very handy CSS Validation Service which can help you find errors in your code. I know I’m going to need it…
Twitter Commands
In lieu of >man twitter here are commands to remember for Twitter:
@username : Reply to that user publicly.
D username : Reply to that user directly.
RT username : Retweet another user’s content to your followers.
#hashtags : Include your tweet as part of the tagged group’s content.
For a more indepth explanation, see Julie King’s Mastering The Jargon article for Canoe Money.
Hemingway Wordpress Theme
If you’re using the Hemingway Wordpress Theme you may have noticed that by default it displays the summary of your last two blog posts.
Personally I’m not a fan of that, I would rather the full content of the last two posts appear.
To fix that, simply go to Design > Theme Editor > Main Index Template (index.php) and edit the following line:
<?php the_excerpt() ?>
and replace it with
<?php the_content() ?>
Simply save the changes and your index page will display full posts.
Google As Your Address Bar
It never ceases to amaze me that people are given a full URL and yet they still type it into Google and click the first link that comes up — which is of course the site in question given that they just entered the whole URL as their Google search. I use to think that this was a limited practice, but I just keep seeing it done everywhere.
So it appears that Google is now the defacto address bar of the world.
Long Island To Soon Get 100 Mbps Cable
So it looks like Long Island will be getting 100 Mbps down and 15 Mbps up Home Cable Internet service soon through the use of DOCSIS 3.0 technology.
Check out the full article over at GigaOM.
Stallman Warns Against View That SaaS is “Free”
From Slashdot:
“‘Software as a service’ means that you think of a particular server as doing your computing for you. If that’s what the server does, you must not use it! If you do your computing on someone else’s server, you hand over control of your computing to whoever controls the server. It is like running binary-only software, only worse: it’s even harder for you to patch the program that’s running on someone else’s server than it is to patch a binary copy of a program running on your own computer. Just like non-free software, ’software as a service’ is incompatible with your freedom.”
