ARTS & FARCES internet

A potentially serious, perhaps fatal, flaw in Google+ is that when an individual (or series of individuals) republishes something someone else has created, the information authority of the original is diluted with each republication.

The solution seems to be a way to provide a link with commentary within the Google+ ecosystem. Because Google most likely intends to sell advertising around everything in Google+, this is not likely to be a high priority concern in the ‘plex.

The problem isn’t unique to Google+, of course. Twitter retweets have the same flaw. That’s why no one can remember who was first with the “if you’re not paying, you’re the product” statement. But it’s much less of a problem with Twitter’s 140 character speed bump.

Google has announced its latest attempt at social networking, Google+. The search engine giant stresses that Google+ is a project, not a product, and it’s aim is to make the entire Google universe more social. Whatever that means.

In reality, Google+ is intended for sharing information with small groups, not the entire internet. As a Google vice president of product management, Bradley Horowitz, explained to Claire Cain Miller, writing for the New York Times, “In real life, we have walls and windows and I can speak to you knowing who’s in the room, but in the online world, you get to a ‘Share’ box and you share with the whole world.”

The project is a social network, connecting your friends, family, and business associates in a collection of “circles.” Each “circle” is completely separate and can be used to share different kinds of information.

To add an individual to one of your “circles,” you use Google+‘s “chip” interface to drag-and-drop them into the appropriate “circle.” Any individual information you’ve added to Google Contacts is available—contacts can also be added from an exported file in CSV format—and any number of “circles” can be created. In any case, Google learned at least one privacy lesson and all contacts must be added manually. What would ordinarily be surprising, but isn’t in light of close observation by government agencies around the globe, is that Google Buzz is, for now, completely disconnected from Google+.

Steven Levy, writing for Wired, spent almost a year following the project within the Googleplex and has the best analysis. Google knows who should be in your “circles” but doesn’t want to risk telling you. Reading Levy’s take on Google+‘s intelligent “circles” makes me shudder and glad that I don’t use Gmail:

“Right now, Google won’t even suggest who should be in your circles. But it has the technology to do so—it’s already making suggestions on who you might include on Gmail mailing lists. So in the future it’s conceivable that Google might indeed provide plenty of nonbinding suggestions for who you might want it your Circles. ‘We’ve got this whole system already in place that hasn’t been used that much where we keep track of every time you email someone or chat to them or things like that,’ says [former Plaxo chief technology officer and recent Google hire Joseph] Smarr. ‘Then we compute affinity scores. So we’re able to do suggestions not only about who you should add to a circle, or even what circles you could create out of whole cloth.’”

In an email to Danny Sullivan, writing for Search Engine Land, Google answers the only question that matters. Is Google+ a Facebook competitor? “No. We realize that today people are increasingly connecting with one another on the web. But the ways in which we connect online are limited and don’t mimic our real-life relationships. The Google+ project is our attempt to make online sharing even better. We aren’t trying to replace what’s currently available, we just want to introduce a new way to connect online with the people that matter to you.” Which, of course, is a round-about way to say, why yes, yes it is a Facebook competitor.

Here we are 20-odd years into the commercial internet and just now getting around to deploying Secure DNS (DNSSEC). The internet’s domain name service (DNS) is the lizard-brain of the internet, connecting numerical IP addresses to human-recognizable names. In theory, the hardened domain name service will use strong cryptography to secure and authenticate email and ecommerce. In practice, we’ll see.

Traditionally, reliable communications were a top-priority network responsibility with security left in the hands of individual nodes on the network. I’m a much stronger supporter of decentralized security that is in the hands of individuals than I am of centralized security that’s out of our individual control and tosses reliability aside as an externalized expense.

John Markoff, reporting for the New York Times, writes, “The technology is viewed by many computer security specialists as a ray of hope amid the recent cascade of data thefts, attacks, disruptions and scandals, including break-ins at Citibank, Sony, Lockheed Martin, RSA Security and elsewhere.” I know better and I know Markoff knows better. We both were around during the Clinton administration when RSA’s cryptography was thought to be much too strong for ordinary civilians and the Clinton administration wanted it kept in a box.

I’m wary of the idea behind Secure DNS. It will be used to tie identity to physical internet addresses. To my way of thinking, the current digital certificates authenticated by a trusted third party—or even self-signed in most cases—coupled with strong, public-key cryptography (with the keys held locally) are “good enough.” I’m not sure I want my identity tied, irrevocably, to a specific internet address. The headline-making security breaches that seem to be happening on an almost daily basis are almost universally related to human failures, not certificate failures.

Moreover, voice-over-IP applications will likely benefit the most from Secure DNS, and the general belief is that it will make possible phone calls over the internet that can’t be intercepted or eavesdropped upon. That’s, of course, nonsense.

On the other hand, if Secure DNS is implemented solely as a way of adding security to the existing domain name system, that’s an overall good thing. DNS cache poisoning and domain spoofing would disappear overnight because all answers to DNS queries would be digitally signed and authenticated against an authoritative source. But doing just one overall good thing is just not in the nature of committee work.

On 27 January 2010, the Egyptian government appears to have issued the order to sever all international connections to the internet. James Cowie, writing for the Renesys blog, reports “... every Egyptian provider, every business, bank, internet cafe, website, school, embassy, and government office that relied on the big four Egyptian ISPs for their internet connectivity is now cut off from the rest of the world. Link Egypt, Vodafone/Raya, Telecom Egypt, Etisalat Misr, and all their customers and partners are, for the moment, off the air.” A tiny internet service provider, the Noor Group, remains an exception to the block and Cowie, Renesys’ chief technology officer, speculates it might be to accommodate the Egyptian Stock Exchange next week.

Technically, all routes to Egyptian networks in the internet’s global routing table were withdrawn. Some 3,500 individual border gateway protocol (BGP) routes were simultaneously withdrawn.

To be clear, these route withdrawals weren’t precisely simultaneous. There wasn’t a “kill switch”—that was flipped. A series of telephone calls were made to the providers who spinelessly complied. The Egyptian internet takedown took less than a half hour, but wasn’t instantaneous.

Matt Richtel, writing for the New York Times, reports that cellphone networks also went dark, citing a Vodafone statement on its website: “All mobile operators in Egypt have been instructed to suspend services in selected areas.”

US journalists are mistakenly reporting that the Egyptian communications blackout is unprecedented. It’s not. As Dan Gillmor, writing for Salon, points out, “Burma largely succeeded in closing off its media borders several years ago, and regimes around the planet have created harsh censorship systems that prevent the majority of their people from seeing information deemed unacceptable by the people in charge.”

The scale of the Egyptian blackout, however, is unprecedented.

What happens when you disconnect 80 million people? We’re about to find out, but it’s probably going to take a while.

Video on the web has been a slow, rocky progression. First there was the Real Media player that came pretty close to killing video on the web altogether. Then there was competing embedded media with Apple’s QuickTime and Microsoft’s Windows Media. More recently, Adobe’s Flash became the go-to method for embedding video on a website. Moving forward, the H.264 video standard has become the de-facto standard for delivering video on the web.

Unfortunately, H.264 is an open but non-royalty-free standard that has significant licensing issues on the commercial production side. Last August, MPEG-LA, the group that oversees licensing for H.264, announced that H.264 would remain royalty-free for the entire life of the license for end-users. The significant licenses on the commercial production side would remain in place.

Citing its “closed” nature, Google has announced it is dropping support of the H.264 video standard in its Chrome browser.

Google points to the launch last year of its own WebM (VP8) project as an attempt to bring yet another open video codec to maturity. The problem is that both WebM and Theora are both quite immature and browser support is limited to Firefox (and now Chrome). H.264 has become the de-facto standard. As a result of Google’s move, the transition to HTML5 just became even more complicated as web publishers will face having to encode video on their websites in at least two different formats.

It’s especially troubling that Google hypocritically continues to support the closed and proprietary Adobe Flash in its browser. One could reasonably assume this lastest move by Google is just an escalation of its pissing match with Apple. Even more troubling is that WebM is in no way patent-safe, as it likely infringes on patents in the H.264 pool.