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.
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.
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.
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.
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. [Read more]
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]
We speculated on vertical stratification of clouds at Interop Unconference back in May: demand for specialized cloud platforms will arise despite the availability of highly centralized low cost utility computing (i.e. Google, Amazon) since specific requirements of privacy or business process will require value added services and specialized architectures. Could one imagine a cloud provider specializing in HIPAA compliance?
Well an example just hit our radar: Fedcloud offers “Federally Compliant Trusted Cloud Computing.” (thanks Data Center Knowledge!) “A Trusted Cloud Computing Environment: Apptis and ServerVault combined our capabilities to provide you computing in an on-demand infrastructure that enables you to acquire, utilize, and disengage without contractual dependency (subscription fees, licenses, or long-term commitments). This extraordinary capability offers a utility bundle inclusive of hardware, software, personnel (24×7x365 engineering and operations, and application management) all with federally compliant security, processes, and procedures.”
Why this verticalization? Architecture and operations can matter a lot when specific requirements are introduced. There is an opportunity for premium margins for utility computing that addresses specific industries. You may need to be in a very narrow geographical area, or need technologies specific to your trade to be running in the cloud data center. Perhaps you aren’t allowed to share a hypervisor with other organizations? Or you might need on-site staff trained in particular arcane skills. Some types of vertical clouds could theoretically rest on top of infrastructure service clouds in the same way that Rightscale and Elastra sit on top of AWS, others will need to have an entirely difference architecture. Look for wide diversification and layering of these “vertical clouds” in the next few years, and a healthy ecosystem of options for cloud consumers!
Google’s new Insights feature, which shows statistics on search terms, yields some interesting results when it comes to Cloud Computing.
There’s no doubt that it’s a hot topic; Insights shows important events related to that topic over time, which is fascinating: Like a stock ticker but for ideas.
I love you. I learn about news from you first. And you’re popular. I get it. I understand that scaling is a challenge. I’ll forgive you that — and the Fail Whale seems to be less and less common.
But being popular isn’t an excuse for getting your SSL certificates wrong. If you’ve got a site (say, twitter.com) and you want to support other sites (say, explore.twitter.com) you need a wildcard certificate. You’re a social site, and a promiscuous one at that, which means a lot of people with bad intentions exploit you. You need every bit of security you can handle, without teaching your users to ignore bad certificate warnings.
This is the second time in a week that I’ve come across a big company messing up their certificates. I think the Internet needs a remedial class in SSL configuration.
My wife and I spend a lot of time online. The other day, I lent her my notebook for a few minutes mid-surf, and she quickly went over to Reddit. As it turns out, most of the links I’d opened were the ones she wanted to read anyway. Over at GigaOm, Om’s been reflecting on Facebook for some time now. And this got me thinking.
Surfing is increasingly a social activity. Think of news aggregators as questionnaires: “Which of these stories do you find most interesting?” If we are what we surf, then the people with whom we have the most in common are likely to have similar surfing patterns. This notion alone isn’t particularly revolutionary, and it’s driving innovation in fields like web analytics. But apply it to Facebook Connect, and it opens up a whole new realm of social networking.
Bitcurrent is part blog, part analyst firm, and part resource site for web operations. We're a loose federation of pundits and entrepreneurs with experience in networking and technology.
