Steve Jobs personally hates me. Specifically, he goes out of his way to spite me by doing things like writing the tethering code on the iPhone. Seriously. Look it up on Wikipedia. What Steve Jobs (nor anyone that added 3G to a netbook) thought about was how these changes impact the wild and exciting world of NAC.

Take a peek at http://tek-tips.nethawk.net/blog/steve-jobs-hates-me where yours truly took a stab at guest blogging to prove this point.

If you’re involved in any aspect of the web or technology, you’re probably aware of Web2Expo. Spun off the Web2Summit, it’s now become the go-to conference for people who have to deliver on the things that VCs and board members dream up in their reality distortion fields.

We’re involved in a couple of things with Web2Expo. First of all, Sean Power and I are teaching a three-hour course on web monitoring, which is a synopsis of our Complete Web Monitoring book (AKA the Raven Book) coming out from O’Reilly later this year. It’s called Watching Websites: A Report from the Frontlines of Web Monitoring. We’re hoping to provide a holistic view of all the tools and techniques companies need to use to understand their presence online (no small task for just three hours!)

Second, I’m moderating a panel on cloud computing with Benjamin Black of Opscode, Lew Moorman of Rackspace.com, Kevin Gibbs of Google, and possibly a fourth participant we’re still confirming. This will be a great discussion — everyone’s been so busy talking about how cloud computing is utopian idealism that we often forget about the job of managing all those virtual components.

You’ve seen bad metaphors for the Internet. Pop culture is filled with films where special effects show computer networks as highways, with towering servers encroaching on light-filled roads. These scenes try to represent the Internet as, well, a series of tubes (Play this clip from Hackers to jog your memory.)*

This happens a lot in Hollywood, and in too many cyberpunk novels (like one I’m finishing now just to spite myself.) I forgive William Gibson’s “collective hallucination” and Neil Stephenson’s Metaverse because, well, they’re good books.

But maybe the UI of the future will look like this after all, at least for certain applications. Check out Britain from Above by way of the folks at Flowing Data. Warning: clicking this video may make your browser lock up for a minute for some reason. Be patient, or go to the Youtube playlist.

There are clips for telecommunications, air traffic, and even shipping on the site itself, which is well worth the visit.

I’m a huge believer in visualizing information and making the world more understandable, and the convergence of things like geomapping and GPS are making understanding even easier. These clips resemble nothing if not an RTS for the real world. It makes me want to click and drag routes for cars and boats.

I used to think Tron was a great movie, but not really a UI. Now I’m starting to wonder how these flying-through-data approaches, first conceived as a network metaphor for the non nerd, can become user interfaces.

This is how the prescient visuals of Minority Report slowly become reality.

We’re about to drink from a firehose of positional data as location-aware personal devices replace traditional cellphones and we move towards a sensor-driven world. We have the cloud computing infrastructure to handle massive computing and fast data retrieval. How long until Britain From Above becomes a live Google Earth overlay?

Oh, wait. It already is. Here’s the site’s Google Earth layer. When will web analytics catch up with this?

(*For real fun, check out the eighties-era Mac copy dialog at 8:18 in that Hackers clip. Anachronisms, FTW!)

There’s an interesting response from Chris Hoff over at Rational Security to my GigaOm piece about cloud computing and security. Chris makes some great points (and flagged a good study on computer fraud that refutes some of what I said.)

Worth a read. What do you think? Are clouds less secure than in-house computing? The usual answer seems to be “it depends” — but what does it depend on? Can we come up with some rules for what’s safe to do in a cloud and when?

Maybe I can convince Chris to come to Vegas and get into a pointed argument about cloud computing risks.

From the Register, by way of Broadsight, it seems that Google has patched an issue with Android that interpreted text you type as commands. So you can type “reboot” and reboot the phone.

Really? Really?

I mean, I’ve heard Android is supposed to be an open platform. But if the tale is true — and there isn’t some kind of double-backflip configuration knob you have to fiddle with to make this work — it’s a big deal.

Consumer electronics don’t like to be open. Openness breeds complexity. The iPhone is criticized for being closed, but it’s usable (despite this post to the contrary) in part because it’s locked down. The button-bar iPhone resembles nothing so much as the old Compuserve menu. It took us years to move from consumer adoption of buttons to comfort with the open web.

If you let humans play with the guts of things, they tend to break in new and creative ways. Social engineering is the new hacking; now that many operating systems are patched and scanned, hackers exploit human weaknesses to send drive-by malware links to Facebook users. (Good thing the bad guys are after Warcraft passwords, then.)

But back to Android. Apple locks it down; Google opens it up. One approach delivers a seamless experience, the other so much flexibility you can hurt yourself. Apple assumes people will use its devices on a busy New York subway, jostling for handholds and bouncing in purses. Google assumes people will hack together scripts and plug-ins, finding new ways to use tag clouds and APIs. Apple partners with monopoly-scale carriers; Google lobbies for free spectrum.

The two philosophies couldn’t be more different. It’ll be fascinating to see whether integration trumps flexibility, or vice-versa.

My favorite thing on the Internets today (aside from Stallman’s tinfoil-hat rant about cloud computing being evil, which I’ll get to later) is this video of the Mythbusters crew researching sobering-up techniques.

When you’re done laughing, think about the first part of that. A member of the media (admittedly, a pretty irreverent one,) showed a roomful of people the illegal content on his hard drive. And they cracked up.

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Jennifer Bell and the folks at Visible Government took the covers off their much-needed I Believe In Open project. If you’re a Canadian, you should go sign up. Simply put: any elected official who isn’t willing to be transparent and accountable to their electorate has something to hide, and we now have the technology to track their record.

Which makes me wonder what Bitcurrent’s record is. Once upon a time, many of the folks behind Bitcurrent were part of Networkshop, a consulting firm that became Coradiant, a web performance company that helped create the end user experience management space.

Back then, Networkshop talked a lot of trash. We blew the whistle on SSL performance issues, and wrote a huge (250+ page) study on load balancing. We also prognosticated a lot.

Using the Internet Way-Back Machine, I decided to go scoop up some issues of Networkshop News and see how they stood up to scrutiny nine years later. Here’s one on how networks change if the PC is no longer the dominant client, from March, 2000.

How do you think it stacks up?

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I don’t want to come across as blindly Googletropic. Google has its wrinkles and warts. But I do admire the way they figure out their mistakes quickly and fix them.

Case in point: The Chrome Terms of Service. Google’s new browser had some pretty onerous terms, namely, that all your data are belong to them. Okay, more specifically, anything you put into the Internets is something they may re-use later.

This makes sense for Google’s mission of indexing the world — today, they only see what they crawl, and what you do on their sites; but much of the Internet happens behind SSL encryption, or in places robots.txt can’t follow. To better advertise to you, they need to know what you’re doing beyond their Googly Appendages.

But Google quickly realized it had overreached, in the same way Facebook did with Beacon. And what I like about Google is that they often correct themselves quickly and completely. They did it when 37Signals compared Appengine demo Huddlechat to its Campfire product. And now, they’ve agreed the TOS is onerous and that they’ll change it, too. Folks like Matt Cutts are a breath of candid fresh air at times when some companies treat online activity like a land grab.

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Cheekily, Google introduced their new web browser today, aptly named “Chrome” for the sheer lack thereof. Google instead maximizes browser real estate by default, and features the web application first and foremost with a minimalistic set of tabs at the very top of the screen and an “omnibox” serving double duty as an address bar and search window. Nice human factors engineering.

To wax on about the clean user interface would unfairly downplay some more crucial and exciting features under the hood: tabs are actually separate processes with sandboxed priveleges. Finally you can have multiple web applications running concurrently without mucking up each others memory space and fighting for the attention of the browser process. Gone are the days of a single piece of Javascript hanging all 20 tabs you have open and potentially causing you to lose your work. Cross-site scripting just got a whole lot harder.
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Splunk, the San Francisco-based startup that makes software to search through huge volumes of IT log data, has named Godfrey Sullivan as CEO. Sullivan, who revamped business intelligence software heavyweight Hyperion before selling it to Oracle for $3.3 billion, is quick to point out that Splunk isn’t, however, another turnaround. “The gorillas have aggregated or acquired the mid-caps they need,” he said. “Life is too short to spend it rescuing the chumps that the gorillas left behind.” [Read more]