Aug 13
Maybe Zuckerberg is right – our privacy is dead
The tracking of online user behaviour is a big deal. And I think it is one of these things that people are aware of – at least to some degree. But how much – and who is tracking your web browsing? Toolness.org wrote a tool, that enables you see just how much tracking is happening and by who. The image is a screen shot of visiting just five web sites – each dot is a separate site, i.e., 37 site in total, even though I only loaded five sites: mozilla.com, wordpress.com, cnn.com, arstechnica.com and amazon.com.
The red dots are the tracker sites (confirmed by privacychoice.org). The two separate dots are mozilla.com (grey) sending information to webtrendsline.com (red), while wordpress.com sends information to wp.com, youtube.com, gravatar.com and quantserve.com (red) (top right five dots)
The big one, which surprised me, created by visiting arstechnica.com, amazon.com and cnn.com – only three sites – and another 27 companies know about my web browsing! Most of whom I have never heard about. For example, loading an arstechnica.com webpage will send your browsing information to Twitter, Facebook, scorecardresearch, outbrain.com, 2mdm.net, addtoany.com, reddit.com, doubleclick.net, and Google.
And sites like scorecardresearch, facebook and doubleclick (owned by Google) collects from other sites. Basically, they are likely to know more about you than any government organisation and maybe even your friends.
Paranoid yet?
Jul 21
Google+ is +Google
Since the Google+ announcement and the subsequent discussion about whether it’ll be Twitter or Facebook or both that will suffer and die as a result, Google+ is emerging as much more than just a social networking site. It is really about integrating Google’s offering across the board into a single, consistent platform – probably the biggest gap in Google’s offerings.
Google has always been about getting the job done, and I think Google’s interpretation of a social networking site is about productivity and collaboration (one of the key features of Google Docs). In contrast, Facebook is mainly about keeping up with your ‘friends’ and playing a game or two – a virtual version of playing the games console at home while chatting with your friends (and watching a bunch of ads). Google’s strength in the social networking market will be their ability to turn the social networking experience into a useful experience for yourself and your friends; rather than being a time waster. Read more
It’s human to error, but real catastrophes require computers
Image via Wikipedia
InfoWorld published a story last week titled the Top 10 worst cloud outages. The article certainly makes for good reading, although it would be nice, if people would stop acting so surprised about cloud failures. It is after all just software and server hardware, and, while very clever, all technology fail at some point despite the recent hype. In fact, the more you have, the more likely it is to experience failures. A Cloud vendor would actually need to work harder to just match a ‘simpler’, traditional data centre in terms of high availability.
The Butterfly Effect
The most important lesson taught at a first aid course is to ‘stop the accident’ – the same is starting to apply to highly interconnected software systems.
The recent Gmail failure caused by a software bug discovered during the deployment process, yet it still managed to affect 0.02 percentage of Gmail users. Skype has experienced two outages due to a combination of localised high load and a (replicated) software bug (discussed here and here). Amazon’s recent failure was a network misconfiguration which escalated into a data replication storm.
High availability built through infrastructure replication typically still share the same software infrastructure, e.g., multiple deployments, same code, so a bug in one equals a bug in all. The space shuttle had two separate flight systems to avoid this and achieve high reliability – not the same as high availability – which in a cloud computing context equals the ability to use two (or more) alternative cloud vendors for the same service.
The case of ‘localised failure bringing down an entire network’ isn’t new of course. Read more
New Twitter account
My name appeared on Twitter’s list of available names… New twitter account: Follow @johnbrondum
Digital Me – Or what’s really wrong with the online portion of our lives
The Great Experiment, a.k.a. The Internet, rolls on at ever greater speed – but I would like you to stop for a moment and think about the points below. There are some fundamental problems, that I believe needs addressing to avoid the experiment going bad. In no particular order:
Social Networks are fundamentally broken. To illustrate, imagine if emails only work within the same domain – e.g., you’d need a hotmail account to email hotmail users, and a gmail account to email Google users. The idea about email would become useless, yet, this is exactly how social networks work today. Users today ‘fix’ the problem by moving to the same the domain (i.e., Facebook) and thereby artificially inflating the perceived value of the network – in effect re-creating the web version of Microsoft’s Windows monopoly. I for one could do without another one of those monopoly. The truly scary scenario is when people start to see the Internet = Facebook (or any other company – shiver). There is a good cover story on IEEE Spectrum about Diaspora – four New York guys working towards an Internet not dominated by a single company. Read more
