Goopster or Napstoogle?

The latest Google rumour seems to be well in line with what I call the "BASF effect". Remember those BASF commercials that proclaim "we don't make products, we make products better", well that's how I think about Google. Sure they home brewed their search and its still their signature offering, but really it was just a better version of search. Pretty much everything else they have done well have been an acquisition of a good product that they added their Google know-how to and made better.

Anyway the rumour that Google might be buying Napster falls right in the line. As I have previously mentioned Napster seems to be leading the pack in providing a well priced music subscription product except... their software is pretty darned buggy and their way of sharing music within a household (which they allow) pretty much blows, that is - it doesn't work. They also seem to have some real problems with their servers - I'm forever experiencing glitches and significant hangs apparenty due to network issues.

So if anyone can tidy up the Napster UI, take out the bugs, make their servers work and persuade more of those luddite music companies (if nothing else with pots of money) to put their titles on Napster, well that someone would be Google. If it improves as much as Google Earth, Blogger and Picasa have I'll be a very happy man within a few months. The question is, since Napster is centered around Windows DRM, what would Google do to support all its die-hard Mac and Linux users?

The trouble with big corp Internet services

Not for the first time I'm experiencing the frustration of dealing with those big corporation who run many of the Internet services we have all come to rely on. Most recently it was Google being unable to resolve problems with their Google Local service - the result was one lost customer, all because they couldn't make one five minute phone call. Instead they sent a whole stream of inane emails that never varied far from canned responses.

At the moment its Yahoo and a problem with switching a domain over to use one of their premium email services. We're up to five emails now and no sign yet of any intelligent life actually reading the emails being sent to them. Each one is cheerfully signed with names like "Carl", "Caitlin" or "Dorothy". Call me cynical (I am, I wont take offensive) but I think these names are as real as those used by strippers or porn stars. They might as well be "Helpful Harry" or "Caring Cindy".

My suspicion is the respondent is probably in a completely different country, paid to categorize each incoming email, pick a canned response and send it off. Somewhere someone decided that doing that a few times will winnow out the frivilous complaints to the point where only the most die-hard and irrate customers are left. At that point we stand a chance of getting someone to actually read the email and perhaps do something, but we haven't reached that point.

The most frustrating part is this is not some free Yahoo service - its actually something that was paid for, and instead of resolving this within a day we're now one week down the line and still no end in sight. This has resulted in one week without email after a change which should have at most resulted in a few hours of email server outage - something email systems are designed to handle. Unfortunately after three days most emails will be bounced back as undeliverable, we've long passed that point.

But my real point is this is typical of Internet services offered by really large companies with millions of customers. They apply (and probably have to) every economy of scale they can, and the result is you, the customer, become about as welcome as a piece of spam. Every input to them has to be analysed, filtered, and processed to the max. There just is no "pick up the phone and speak to someone" option left. For many we realize that getting someone on the phone is often just the beginning (like dealing with the phone company) but at least you have this tangible feeling that there really is a human out there who is dealing with your problem. Instead we are more often than not left to think we are just exchanging emails with nothing more than a glorified Eliza program.

Now what was it about machines that bothers you?^*

Much ado about Port 25

I just spent a couple of hours doing some support for a local business person who was having trouble with sending email from the road. It turned out he was suffering from WiFi driver problems (most likely caused by a prior virus and spyware infestation), and also the notorious "Port 25 blocking" problem. The former was easy to fix, the latter, well its pretty much endemic now and unlikely to go away.

To me port 25 blocking has always seemed like a brute force workaround for a much deeper problem. Its kind of like taking the wheels cars to prevent speeding, it solves the problem but it sure impacts mobility! Ironically the very people who instigated port 25 blocking - the big companies who offer DSL and Cable - are finding its hurting their own users who can no longer send email away from home without resorting to webmail. Naturally a lot of them would much rather you used their webmail because third party email clients like Thunderbird and Outlook just give them heaps more support issues to deal with. However until all web email packages are as good as Scalix I think I'll pass on that restriction. Plus you know there are times when I just have to have my email on my local computer because the network isn't always there, reliable and unfettered even though some people would just love for you to think that is the case.

Now I have noticed that Microsoft has managed to build into Outlook support for reading and sending email via HTTP, but only for its MSN Hotmail service. That appears to work well and nicely gets around the pesky port 25 problem. It even manages to keep the local and remote mail nicely synchronized without any third party or additional steps. It just works. However this solution is basically a proprietary one that doesn't address the problem that there is no universal alternative to SMTP that fixes all of its problems.

Indeed why didn't they do just that - fix the problems? Well the problem is that no one could really agree on what the fix is - between safe harbors of SPF (Sender Policy Framework) and DomainKeys there's an ocean full of mail servers that are ignorant of both. Indeed it will probably be years before a significant number of all mail servers are aware of these new standards, and properly configured to reject email from unsigned domains or inappropriate sources. If you doubt me just look how long it took for people to figure out that open relays (mail servers that will forward email from and too anyone) are really a bad idea.

I have my doubts that either DomainKeys or SPF (the former is superior) will have any significant effect on spam since spammers will still be able to set up valid domains on the fly with all the right credentials, spam from them and disappear into the night. And they will still be able to find compromized machines and extract (or guess) valid email credentials to send via a legitimate mail account. Remember that enough machines can be hijacked then a huge spam attack can be sent using even a modest amount of sends from each machine. An ISP might notice someone sending a thousand emails in a day - but its not out of the ordinary for a business customer or someone who mails to a list regularly. They might step in to investigate if someone was sending say 10,000 emails a day, but if you have thousands of machines compromised one would never have to exceed or even reach these levels.

In the mean time we'll have to live with the shot gun approach of port 25 blocking because spaming from open WiFi connections and hijacked "zombie" machines still gets the majority of its mail through to the recipient. When the day comes that the majority of email is rejected and the majority which gets through is filtered, then finally spamming may just die out. But my prediction is that at the end of my long dark tech-time of the soul we'll still be living with spam. It will effectively be the trash in the streets of the Internet that everyone sees, few bother to do much about and all complain about.

What is the real solution?

Well clearly the act of accepting email for sending and accepting it for delivery to the end recipient need to be well separated. The initial stage should always require an authenticated connection from a valid user of that server, delivery to the recipient should not. All agents that deliver email after the authenticated user session has ended need some kind of independently authenticated status, possibly with a bond or insurance purchased against abuse by spammers.

The former can be achieved by handing out email sending certificates obtained by application to a registrar - just like we do with registering a domain. Indeed the two might be combined for those that want both a domain and license to deliver email. One could argue this is exactly what DomainKeys does, maybe it is. The latter can be achieved by an add on service on purchases - varying levels and costs of insurance/bond could be granted and a mail recipient could rank incoming email by metric. For senders without any insurance/bond the recipient could then fallback on a distributed trust metric obtained via monitoring of spam traffic. Hopefully servers that have a record of not sending spam will eventually earn a good trust metric and be able to purchase a bond or insurance at a heavily discounted rate.

Of course there is no reason why good old unregulated and free (as in beer) port 25 SMTP mail can't continue but just like unmoderated Usenet it will become the domain of low signal to noise traffic with little commercial or actual value (except perhaps for terrorists communicating somewhere below the noise level). At that point I wont begrudge anyone blocking it with impunity.

Linux for the timid

Thanks to Chicken or Beef for reminding me that there are more ways than one to play with Linux these days. For the most part installing Linux - if you can figure out which one to install - is relatively painless. In fact its usually no different from installing Windows on a PC or laptop that you don't have all the manufacturer specific drivers for - which I did today. Thank goodness for the Internet and a working machine connected to it.

But it is still possible to botch an installation - especially when you're going to have the Linux installer repartition your hard drive to make room for a dual-boot system. At this point non-techie installers who might be dabbling with Linux will tend to bite their nails and worry. Last year I thought I'd play it super safe and install the latest Ubuntu on my external USB drive and boot from that, but guess what, it ended up zapping my Windoze partition. Sigh. At that point I found out my backups really do work (thank goodness for Retrospect, but in this case I'd already tested it before hand.

Thus I was happy to find out that VMWare is now dishing out a free virtual machine "player" that lets you load virtual machine images created by third parties. I was interested in virtualization technologies so I gave it a whirl and loaded up their browser appliance virtual machine image. Well stone the crows if it wasn't an Ubuntu Linux preloaded with Mozilla Firefox and a few other goodies. I could even browse my Windows network, and fire up an RDP client to log into remote Windows machines. Sweet. Believe me, this is a serious alternative to dual boot and for development very convenient. I didn't run benchmarks but even on my lowly 1.6Mhz laptop it seemed to run lickety split.

Even better after digging up that link for my comment on Chicken or Beef I discovered that Ubuntu now has a full development Ubuntu 5.10 virtual machine available for VMWare Player. Other Linux people are following suit - Novell, Red Hat to name a few. Its a great and really low impact way to evaluate a product, even one that's not a native Windows app. And because VMWare Player persists a file system between "boots" you can actually get serious work done with them.

Google Goodness

Yes I know I've been kind of down on Google of late, obiviously that's a mostly unpopular opinion - the stock market clearly loves them - but as I've said before, apart from search their most successful products were all acquired. Exhibit A in this category is clearly Google Earth. Google Earth was a great product called Keyhole (key-what?) before they acquired it. Google added an open API, spiffed up the user interface, made it free - the rest was history. I fully expect Google Earth to eventually become the alternate front end to web browsing. I also expect Google to start selling virtual advertising on Google Earth any time soon - they have the virtual real estate, why not use it.

But one of the amazing things that has come out of Google Earth and its APIs is that the imaginative minds of the world have been unleashed. The most recent manifestation of this that I have discovered is fboweb.com. These guys have made it possible to track the location of commercial airline flights in the USA in real time. So now you can see the location of the planes in 3D and even pull up a display off all the flights inbound to the congested airport of your choice.

Finally I discovered you can also get FAA sectional chart overlays and 3-dimensional representations of restricted and class B/C airspace. For anyone at all interested in aviation that is very cool. Google was the enabler, Keyhole was the creator and the power - well that was to the people.

Portable audio players that make sense as well as music

Finally someone is making a portable audio player that runs on plain old AA batteries. Why is this such a big deal? AA batteries are available the world over, as are AA rechargable batteries and rechargers. But unfortunately manufacturers prefer to build devices with proprietary lithium-ion batteries which although offering higher power to weight ratios also have the problem of dying after a few hundred charge-discharge cycles. This means unless your device has replaceable batteries you'll end up just buying another audio player - exactly what the manufacturer wants. Personally I prefer to buy technology that lasts 5+ years and AA batteries for power means battery power will not be the thing that makes them obsolete. I can tell you AA batteries have been around as long as me and that's a long time, almost fourty years. Can you say that about any other technological standard in your life? Maybe - but very few.

Not your DARPAs Internet

So what the hell happened - a long time ago, in a millenium far far away a bunch of egghead computer guys designed a network with error correction, retries, redundancy, flexible routing, etc. etc. all so it could survive a nuclear war. That network was called DARPAnet and grew up into the Internet.

But low and behold today it seems with all the progress companies like Sprint are still building networks with single points of failure that at the whim of a single misguided backhoe (or it's ilk) can fail and take out their entire West Coast network.

Can I say... DUH!

The CES Google yawn (or was it a Googleflop?)

I think I'm comfortably in the minority in being overwhelmingly underwhelmed by Google's CES keynote. Although from the description by Engadget it Robin Williams performance was definitely great, I hardly think that's something to write home about for a multi-billion dollar company.

So here we go...

Google Video
Lets first take a look at Google Video. Although relatively few people knew about Google Video at the time of the CES announcement it has actually been out for a while now (months). But up until now most of the content was contributed by users and is of the home-movie or ripped as in ripped-off but the owner didn't find out about it yet kind. It's okay I suppose - the playback is good enough and its useful to have a free as-in-beer repository for big videos. But for home use its nothing like say Flickr is for photos (and I've heard they'll be supporting video eventually), so it was clear this was destined be for greater things. Like all home grown Google products the user interface is simple but weak.

So what of those bigger things? Well Google Video gets mainstream i.e. commercial content. Like I said it was obvious that was going to happen, I think everyone expected and if they didn't they should ask themselves what self respecting advertising company would want to get into video, especially mainstream CBS content. Although Google will initially sell video and video sans advertising at that (just like Apple is doing) my prediction is that they'll find a way to make it free and insert user, locality or content specific ads into it while you watch. I mean that's what all those TV guys want really - sure they charge big bucks for TV ad space but the world is moving away from watching TV, at least in realtime and they have to find someone who really knows how to put content, locality and user targeted ads in front of people watching their media.

For those kinds of ads advertisers will pay as much is not more to the media companies as they do today, indeed Google has the opportunity to open up video advertising to a whole new raft of advertisers who'd never consider TV advertising - especially small local businesses. Imagine there was a food show and you had a local cooking store or restaurant - imagine you could put an ad out there to show when only users from your neighborhood watched it. Google could do this, for a low price because they could sell the same ad space in different areas many, many times over. You know it makes sense and will happen. And for the big advertisers imagine they could pay to have their ads only in front of certain demographics based on information viewers had already willingly provided to Google (check their privacy policy - they can already use that info to target ads to you). You know that kind of facility will give Google big opportunities and again they can resell the same ad space over and over to many market segments.

With these kinds of revenue opportunities I think Google will soon be able to launch an ad supported video stream for free and Google will make tons of money and so will the media companies. Ever wondered why Google has been busy buying up dark-fibre? Will of course they'll need it to distribute and stream all those terabits of content throughout the country. They already have the servers and server know-how to stream it - they just need the bandwidth to distribute it.

I suppose the big news about Google getting into the video business is the Apple factor - basically Google has the potential to effectively kill Apple's little video download service and the reasons are many.

• Google is a cross platform company, widely supported by Windows, Linux and Apple users whereas Apple stuff still sells mostly to diehard Apple hardware users. Apple tried to broaden that market by tying their music and video download to the iPod but that has many limitations because there is so much more competition in the portable media player market these days.
• As already mentioned Google can bring its considerable advertising muscle to the problem and offer, hopefully free ad supported service for those that don't want to pay. It's my contention that any company than can insert enough highly relevant and good quality ads into media stream will find considerable support for viewing them. Thus Google will be able to corner the considerable market of people who just don't want to pay to have ad-free entertainment.
• Finally Google has just so much muscle it can starve Apple of content providers. Signing up CBS was a baby step, sooner or later all the providers will come rushing to Google for a piece of the action they deliver. Eventually the small market of pay-per-view ad-free users offered by Apple will lose interest and they might even enter into exclusive deals with Google that shut Apple out completely.

Naturally all these things are bad for Apple, it only remains to be seen if Google can actually execute and change the face of advertising and media distribution for good. Lets hope they don't give us years of "beta" labeled service with mediocre UI and limited content, if they do others like Yahoo and MSN will rush in to fill the landscape of opportunity that has temporarily opened up.

Google Local Mobile
Again to those who follow the Google technologies this is just a launch of something that's already been out for a while now. In fact while I was interviewing at Google back in September it was already out so how new is it? Finally as someone who worked on WAP applications since 2000 technologically this is no miracle, its just using (albeit well) technology that's been embedded in phones since 1999 and earlier. Its good to hear that Motorola will embed Google apps (search and mail I assume) into its future phones but again I know that takes nothing more than developing a J2ME application which is far superior for this sort of thing than WAP (which typically has severe limits on content type and size it can handle).

Google Local Mobile would have been a much more interesting announcement if it included a tie in with the carriers ability to locate your phone via built in GPS or cellphone tower triangulation. Yes they can do that now and with triangulation they don't even need to ask your permission to do it (although carriers don't give that info out to just anyone). I expect the big sticking point here was very greedy carriers. Let me tell you, next to people like AOL and media companies the cellphone companies are about the greediest. Back at the turn of the century (i.e. six year ago) people like Sprint would demand seven figure sums to put your WAP site on the first page of the phone's default link menu. Imagine what kind of a deal they would want from Google to partner for location specific services and advertising. My guess is a huge pile of cash or a giant slice of revenue. Google would be better off launching its own cellular network (hint, hint) that it had complete control over.

Google Pack
Oh please, this had to be the biggest disappointment of the lot. A company announces at CES its going to bundle its major free products and throw 3rd party software that you need that's already free. I mean who ever had a problem downloading Adobe Acrobat Reader? And who didn't get a free subscription of Norton or some other anti-virus program when they bought their computer? Or couldn't get a 6 month limited subscription of Norton AV from somewhere else? Lets face it, this is just a huge marketing ploy for Norton. I would have been much happier if they'd thrown in a truely free forever version of an AV product like say Grisoft AVG.

While AdAware is a well known and popular spyware removal solution it is also well known that is not the best and really not that good at all for pre-emptive protection against Spyware. On a PC you'd be much better off with Microsoft's own and free antispyware solution or if you really must pay someone for the best removal solution then there's Webroot's Spysweeper.

Yes indeed, Google Pack was nothing but a self promoting and cheap (to create) bundling of convenient but good software which will probably make Google some money along the line from the 3rd party s/w it bundles. Really nothing anyone should be excited about.

Wind Up PC
Well its good to know that Google is throwing dollars at this project. Overall I think more Internet everywhere and for everyone is good for the human condition. However don't lets pretend there is no ulterior motive - more internet users means more internet commerce customers and more advertising revenue which means... more Google bucks in the bank. Even so, I wont fault them for this - they are damned if they do and damned if they don't.

Finally a diesel hybrid

Maybe there's hope for the American auto-industry - GM just unvielded a diesel-electric hybrid muscle car reputed to get 65mpg. This addresses too of my concerns - it has hope of being powered by bio-diesel, and secondly it will appeal to that much under reported sector of gas-guzzling drivers: muscle and sports car owners. I know that SUVs are an easy target, they are big, irritating, in your face and often in your side of the parking space.

However people often forget that if automakers aren't selling to the SUV driving crowd then they are typically selling to the boy-racer and grown-up boy-racers. Those cars are neither low consumers of gas or low emitters of pollution. Fortunately there's a good deal fewer of them on the streets than SUVs and they are still significantly better than SUVs in terms of absolute gas mileage. If you factor in how little these sports cars weigh compared to say a Ford Expedition its actually surprising they consume as much gas as they do - does that have to be so?

Apparently not - there are pure electric sports cars out there that can beat the pants of most American muscle cars and are capable of running on 100% clean renewable electricity. So why not a hybrid muscle car that is at least better than average?

Holy smokes batman

I know, if post much more about DreamHost I'll have to rename this blog "The Long Dark Dream-Time of the Soul" (actually that wouldn't be a bad title for some existential wanderings and wonderings). But anyway, I could help but mention just when I thought it couldn't get any better DreamHost is now offering 20 GB, yes TWENTY GIGABYTES of disk storage and 1 TB, yes ONE TERABYTE of data transfer per month. My calculator says that is equivalent to a continuous transfer of 3Mbits/s.

I have no idea how they can do that but its a deal, its a steal, its sale of the f**king century, so go get some now if only to store all your MP3s and photos offsite somewhere. Just in case it didn't soak in the first few times you can use the coupon code TECHTIMEMAX at sign up for the maximum discount of $97 off all yearly plans and above. There's a 97 day no quibble satisfaction guarantee so why wait? Share and enjoy!

El Goog- the anti-Google

For a while now I've been thinking of writing a bunch of bloc entries discussing the pros and cons of various googol services and products. That's nothing original, their products get analyzed to death, but I thought I could add at least a little insight coming at it from the (only slightly bitter) perspective of someone who interviewed there and was subsequently rejected.

My four trips to the googolplex for interviews gave me something like eight hours and over a month of in between time to contemplate all kinds of stuff about their products both good and most importantly bad because no one would seriously turn up at a googol interview and say their stuff was all perfect. If that was the case they wouldn't need to hire anyone would they? And then there's the endless "what would googol do" lines of thought about new stuff they could do, or current non-googol stuff that googol could do better.

Anyway, looking at the googol logo for the googillionth time it occurred to me that backwards it spells "El Goog" and elgoog.com would be a fun name for a blog about Google products. Unfortunately it turns out that elgoog.com is already registered to Google and I happened to notice that while they were at it they also registered GoogleSucks.com. I wonder if they will actually use elgoog.com for anything beyond squatting?

New Years Gift

My hosting company is DreamHost.com and I have to say I'm pretty darned happy with them. Lots of storage - starting at 4.8GB, tons of bandwidth - starting at 120GB/month (I haven't found anyone that comes close on bandwidth for the price), a free domain registration, full DNS, php, unlimited mySql databases, full shell access (ssh and all that) and best of all unlimited domains so great for hooking up your friends with free hosting because lets face it you're never going to use all that storage and bandwidth. Even better is every week they add another 40MB of storage allowance and another 1GB/month of bandwidth.

Because I'm a generous chap and all, and yes because in a years time I'll get a 10% slice of your hosting fees (and you can do the same with your referrals) I've shamelessly created a maximum discount code for you to use. It gives you up to $97 off your first year of hosting fees. So if you sign up for a year of their very generous "crazy domain insane" hosting it'll only cost you $12.40, that's just $1.03 per month.

How do you get this? Well go to DreamHost and use the promo code 0101010MAX to get a maximum discount for all their plans.

What's the downside?

The only things I could ding DreamHost on are:

1. They don't have as many one-click installs of php apps as some hosting companies - but no problem if you're a do-it-yourself person, and to be honest they have most of the important stuff like phpBB.
   
2. No Java - interesting to me but probably not most people, and its still pretty rare to find supported by anyone else (GoDaddy is now offering Java).
3. Not the greatest email filtering - they support SpamAssasin but you don't get a huge amount of control over its configuration and I don't really like the way its integrated with their webmail.
   
4. Some weirdness with configuring FTPaccess for sites to allow independent developers, you can use WebDav to get around it but then you have problems with php. I think they need to get a pure web based file management package that removes the need to create FTP accounts to modify your sites files.
   
5. They had an uptime glitch during the LA power outage in 2005. Miy sites were down for about 5 hours, some sites said 24 hours or more. The problem was caused by power supply issues (generators that failed) which is actually pretty common but I'd rather they did some more testing and preparations. Ultimately it doesn't matter too much to me because I'm not a commercial operation. If you are you should find someone with a guaranteed level of service - it'll be much more expensive.
   
6. No unique IP and you'll need to purchase one if you need SSL - its $4.95 a month extra but that's not unreasonable IMHO.
   

Probably the worst issue is mail filtering, out of the box its just not that effective. I'd say it gets about two thirds to three quarters of all spam and my home mail server that does no more than realtime-blackhole filtering catches about 90% or more. For this reason I still send the bulk of my mail through my home server. But if you're a do-it-yourself kind of person even this is not a fair criticism of DreamHost since they do let you do whatever procmail filtering you want which means you can just install and configure your own copy of SpamAssassin.

Overall the unlimited domains, DNS and massive bandwidth provisions make it too good to pass up. I've also had pretty good experience with getting responses from their customer support re. questions and problems. Problems have been resolved in an hour or two, and even dumb questions have got repsonses within 24 hours. Yes there is some trash talk here and there on their forums from people who had a bad experience, but I haven't found anything of substance in them - mostly its blowhards who want the world for nothing and in particular don't realize what shared hosting is - they often expect to get level of service equivalent to dedicated server hosting for just $9.95 a month - good luck finding that, just the electicity cost alone would rule it out for now. More likely you'll see cheaper and cheaper shared hosting plans as virtualization technologies make it easier and cheaper to do. Overall my take is that pretty much everyone else at DreamHost is happy or very happy. Overall I'd say I'm very happy especially considering that value for money.

So remember, if you want to start 2006 with fab and cheap hosting TECHTIMEMAX is the promotional discount coupon code to use!