The Accidental Billionaires: The Founding of Facebook

I don't know about anyone else, but I've been looking forward to 'The Accidental Billionaires', that new book by Ben Mezrich, since the day I learned of it. It's set to be released on July 14th, but I managed to get my hands on it today, a week early. I'm about half-way through it, but I figured I might as well come here to gloat.

Google Ordered To Give User Data To Viacom

In an unbelievable ruling, a judge ruled that Google must turn over all Youtube records of videos watched, including the users' names and ip addresses.

I think it's a terrible ruling that must be immediately reversed. It surely puts many people's identities and privacy at risk (just think back to the AOL Search Data Leak.

To give credit to Google, they put up a huge fight, and are undoubtedly still trying to have the ruling reversed. There's really too much info to get into, but these two articles manage it wonderfully:

Wired
Electronic Frontier Foundation


UPDATE: Here is an article from the Electronic Frontier Foundation with new statements from Viacom and Google regarding the privacy issue.

Shuttle Announces $199 Linux Box, $99 Barebones Kit

Shuttle has announced that they are making an adventure into people's Linux lives with a $199 dollar Linux box and a $99 barebones kit. Launch dates have not been announced yet. As you can see, these sound like awesome deals, although the specs will make or break them I guess.

Link: Engadget

A .Com Service in 24 Hours

Here is an interesting article about how the website Wigitize.com was built in about 24 hours time. It really goes to show how we are in another garage technology age at the moment.

Link: Building a .Com in 24 Hours

Firefox Live Chat Support Launched

There's now a new form of help available to new and old users of the Firefox browser. It's a live chat support system, and it looks like a promising way to help beginners with the installation, use, and common problems that they may have with the browser, while at the same time giving another part of the open source community a way to contribute without having programming or more specialized skills available. As of writing this, the Firefox support site still lists the service as open and ready for questions.

If you feel you could lend a hand and have some fun at the same time, helping others out with their problems, you can find the steps here. The steps are pretty basic, although right now, I'm a little doubtful about the amount of traffic in need of help. It's in beta, so hopefully once it's officially released, the service will be better integrated into the services of Firefox.

This is just one of the many neat ideas that are constantly coming out of the open source community.

Source: Firefox Support Blog

Verizon Now Offering A Symmetrical FiOS Package

Verizon is now offering a 20/20 internet package. Yes, 20 down and up! Aimed at the consumer, I guess they're trying to see what a consumer will ultimately go for. I think this is great news, considering the internet is now not only a source of information, but also a place where normal consumers put their information. With the recent surge in online backup solutions, I'm sure having a slow upload connection would have significantly hurt when you had to upload your data. As well, there are more and more devices coming out that utilize servers so a consumer can access their content across the internet. I can only hope that people will take advantage of this, and give a reason for more service providers to jump on the bandwagon.

|Source|

Our Future Privacy Risks

An anonymous comment in my previous article (Don't Block Our Torrents!) pointed out a p2p application, Share (P2P). There are many privacy concerns in the world today. Information is collected constantly about us. At our workplaces. At the stores we go to. And even online. Constantly, we are giving out information that is completely out of our control. The world's technology is integrating, and access to information is becoming global. This article examines risks to our privacy and concerns for the future. But first, a history of some anonymous file sharing applications that got me started on this topic.

It seems to have started at first with Winny. It was created by a Japanese man as an anonymous way to transfer files over a peer to peer network. It is non-centralized and supports swarm downloading (pretty much the norm in p2p apps now a days). The creator of Winny had his home raided and the source code confiscated. On May 10th, 2004, he was arrested for suspected conspiracy to commit copyright violation. After the halt on development of Winny, Share was created by an anonymous Japanese engineer to carry on with what Winny started. Winny and Share seem to work by keeping ip addresses secret and encrypting files before transfer, and then decrypting them upon successful file transfer.

Although there have been a few arrests with Winny, the police did not catch them entirely through the file-sharing network. It was not a security breach, but instead a system of elimination. The police obtained ip addresses through an integrated forum, after which they blocked access to all ip addresses except the ones obtained, allowing them to verify the sharing of files from the specific ip addresses.

The programs aren't too useful in many places outside of Japan as most of the rest of the world is still lacking in internet speed in comparison to Japan. Share limits download and upload speeds to a minimum of 50 KB/s. I expect encryption file sharing applications will gain popularity as the rest of the world's internet speeds increase.

There are arguments that anonymous file sharing applications only exist for the reason of sharing illegal files. I am a believer in privacy, and don't believe this to be true. I think people have a right to protect their identity online (as the internet wasn't built for privacy). With an ip address and an extensive network with no privacy, I believe it would be possible for people to keep tabs on others as to what their interests, jobs, and hobbies may be. Programs like this may become important in the future as our privacy is scraped away by the ever increasing online authorities watching our every moves. Another reason this mass documenting could be threatening for our privacy is because information is power. Marketers and business people would love to assemble such a network for these reasons. I think we should have the right to choose the knowledge we allow people to have about us, and the right to safeguard it.

Oh, and in a very funny turn of events, the Okayama Prefectural Police Force had a large leak of data over Winny. Data of over 1500 investigations was leaked, and is apparently the largest amount of information held by Japanese police to have ever been leaked. How ironic considering these police forces chase and track p2p users for their "crimes". The bad side, and another point proving that the archival and tracking of our private information is a threat to our privacy, is that the information included sensitive data, such as the names of sex crime victims!

I'm curious as to what other people think about our privacy in the future, and if we have a right to safeguard it. I must say as well, that an ip database profiling people of the internet would be quite a feat, as there are a variety of ip naming systems, with static and dynamic. I still believe it to be possible to accurately pin-point someones identity even with dynamic ip addresses if a time-stamp system is used (doesn't take much to integrate that, most programming languages have that built in). Internet service providers would have the proper information of which time a person had that specific ip address for police, while it wouldn't be as important for marketers. And although there is a large usage of dynamic ip address naming systems, I think we'll start to see this diminish as the practical use of home servers increases and people start to demand static ip's. Marketers already use things such as Google's Hot Trends, showing a list of the most popular search queries.

Our privacy is slowly eroding whether we acknowledge it or not.


The information for this article was obtained from these Wikipedia articles:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Share_(P2P)
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Winny
And a special thanks goes out to the anonymous poster who pointed me towards these amazing applications, working to safeguard our privacy (whether people think so or not).

Don't Block Our Torrents!

On MSNBC, I read an article about Comcast blocking some internet traffic. Tests show that Comcast is interfering with some peer to peer (p2p) network traffic. While I'll admit a lot of p2p traffic is of copyrighted material, it does have its major uses as well. For instance, pretty much all Linux Distributions can be acquired from a p2p network (usually through torrents). Internet companies should stay competitive, and neutral on data. Don't think for a moment that internet companies aren't being pressured by media companies either. I tend to rant about the media companies "not getting it". So here it goes.

Torrents provide a way for anyone, especially "the little guy" to provide content to others, while avoiding high costs of servers and bandwidth. Torrents are one of those revolutionary ways of distributing files, and I think some people just can't grasp it.

One way for media companies to avoid many illegal downloads would be to provide a legal way of obtaining them. Of course, the prices should be void of any manufacturing, shipping, or packaging costs. The media companies that have tried to digitally distribute content can't seem to grasp this. Other than ease of use, why should you have to pay full price for half a product, when everyone else can get it with packaging? And, especially when a torrent of the full, non-protected content is a search away.

You must overlook the people who say, "Well, then get up and go buy it". These people can't seem to grasp the idea. Look at it this way. In a brick and mortar store, would you normally sell a product to someone at the normal sale price, even if it was missing its packaging or damaged? Any legitimate store would be negotiable with such an item. The damage in this case would be the extreme DRM (digital rights management).

So take this in mind next time you set prices on digital media:
"Digital Media = Open Box Content. Price accordingly."

TV-Links Raided and Shut Down!

Today, TV-Links was shut down. TV-Links was a site that provided links to movies and TV shows on popular media sharing sites, such as Youtube. Apparently the police in the UK have arrested the owner on charges of "facilitation" of copyright infringement.

Am I the only one who has a problem with these charges? Congratulations media companies, instead of going after the real copyright infringer's, you go after TV-Links. I think these charges might be a big deciding factor in the future of the present internet in the UK. Can anyone be charged for linking to TV-Links? And, are people in the UK going to have to be vigilant about who they link to? The media companies have gone and started a war between themselves and the rights of people on the internet. To me, the big companies are becoming dictators of what content we can link to.

As long as Tv-Links didn't physically help upload the content, there should be no charges for "facilitation". This is controlling who we can link to on the internet. It is completely destroying one of the fundamental parts of the internet, "The World Wide Web".

Hey, guess what? Google has links to all the content TV-Links provided. Why hasn't it been named in the charges? If these charges go through, the internet could be on its way to "The World Wide Marble Pile". It would be nothing more than chaos with no way to navigate.

So my question is this: Should a large corporation be able to dictate who we link to, and what the future of the internet should be? And second of all, if TV-Links can be charged for the links, shouldn't any major search engine also be responsible for their links, regardless of who (people) or what (robots) found and indexed them?

Internet Ad Controversy

I am growing very tired of people whining about advertising revenue being lost due to ad blocking. I guess they've been bothered by the television stations going bankrupt from lost advertising, and the loss of the lawsuit in 1979 that allowed it... Err, wait a minute. Television stations are still selling advertising space, and last time I checked, it's not cheap either. So, what is the big difference from VCR's to web advertising?

Well, to start off, web advertisers are addicted to clicks. And this is one primary reason people are blocking ads in the first place. Advertisers enjoy routing their customers through their servers, instead of just putting it on the primary server the web page is on. Many of these advertising companies must not be in touch with their watchers. Most people, whether they know it or not, have suffered terrible load times due to advertisements on a page. These are not things they wanted to load, but instead, things forced at them for profits and exposure. They could at least maintain their servers and keep load times quick. Take a lesson from Google's ads and servers. And, after saying this, I must clearly state my opinion on the internet advertising business. I completely agree with the role advertising plays, and that it is there for a reason. It's not practical to get rid of it. It helps consumers get the information they want, while it helps web site owners pay for their hosting and maybe make some additional profit to keep them working on their sites. Web advertising still must evolve a lot (and if any high traffic site wants to hire me, I'd gladly help your advertising evolve!).

One thing that helps keep advertising on a page is entertainment. They have learned this time and time again with television, yet, when it comes to the internet, many ads are still dull. Anything more than text, should be entertaining. Any time spent watching an ad is good or bad exposure, depending on the reaction of the consumer to the ad. If it's a fast loading, entertaining ad, people are more likely to spread it, talk about it, and remember it. That is the nature of the internet. One of the best things for an advertiser is for their ad to go viral.

I'm not worried about anyone blocking Firefox (at least anyone worth while on the internet, the people blocking Firefox might as well not exist). Lets face it, there isn't an easy way of telling if someone is using an ad-blocking program, and blocking all of a group of users is lost profits, exposure, and potential purchases. Anyone interested in keeping a good image with users, while at the same time keeping their focus on profits, would not cut Firefox users off.

Now, lets pretend that for some odd reason, everyone who uses the internet suddenly learned how to install ad-blocking software and plug-ins, and suddenly the world wide web became straight to the point. I seriously doubt it would be the downfall. It may affect a few, but, I guess that would be Darwinism at work. Weeding through websites, and deciding what worthy few would stay around. And another thing, I seriously doubt if everyone had ad-blocking software, that it would be the downfall of internet advertising. Nope, we would still have to live with it. Thats when creative individuals come up with alternative ways of advertising. Even I have many ideas that are certainly implementable and profitable, for web 2.0 sites, as well as the ordinary static sites.

Big advertising sites such as Google have smartly decided not to comment on this issue as it may bring up too much publicity for ad-blocking software and do damage. They think the best way to keep everything the way it is, is to keep quiet and let all the fuss about advertising die down. I think that is the best move for this situation.

Now, lets look at one of these few individuals who seem to not be worried about advertising revenue in the first place because they blocked all Firefox users, but still raise a fuss. According to New York Times, only 2.5 million people use Adblock Plus, one of the more popular ad-blocking plugins, and Firefox has been downloaded more than 400 million times. This site, whyfirefoxisblocked.com, is a site some people redirect Firefox users to. The latest post on the site seems rather mad towards all German people (the developer of Adblock Plus is German), saying as a German, the developer doesn't understand the concept of standing up for their rights. It goes on to say that German people "placidly" allowed Hitler "to turn their nation into his own personal toilet...". He also says that Americans had to come in and rescue the world from their mess. He also goes on to say that as an American, he has to stand up for what's right. Well, he is one of those few that will end up going extinct going by his attitude. He is obviously against open source software, seeing how he expects Mozilla to disallow the Firefox plugin (obviously he picks and chooses which rights to stand up for). And while I'm talking about his comments, let me just point out that it was America who sat "placidly" around when the world was already in war. It was America who decided it wasn't its problem, and it was America who wrongly made that decision. And don't get me wrong, I love America, I just felt I had to point that out.

To end on an educational, yet humorous point, I noticed that at the end of the latest post on whyfirefoxisblocked, the word cohorts is used. Well, I just had to point this out. While taken out of context, the word cohort in computer science means; to quote wikipedia, "A cohort in computer science is a group of proximate data and/or operations. It is a mean for scheduling to achieve greater performance." So thank you whyfirefoxisblocked, at least you see why some of us block ads; the developer is trying to achieve greater performance!!

Anyone else have an opinion about the state of web advertising and the future of it? Leave a comment, I'd love to hear!

Digital Downloads: The Grass Is Greener On the Other Side

Digital downloads are starting to take off, as technology makes it easier for the everyday consumer to download content without any deep understanding of technology. Content is starting to appear more and more on the internet, and is available to anyone at the click of a mouse. Larger companies are starting to see the benefit of the digital age, even if, they still insist on digital rights management. Media companies are always afraid of jumping to new methods of distribution, if you want a definition of conservative, look no further. In this article, we shall examine a couple benefits of digitalization, as well as some possible downsides. In the end, it will hopefully be clear, that going digital favors everyone.

Ease of use is one of the reasons why technology is being developed so rapidly. The computer is now becoming the central controller of media in households. Whether your streaming video to an Apple TV, downloading music, or watching the latest trailer or political campaign on websites such as Youtube, a computer can be used as the final destination for anything media. This central hub is eliminating the use of physical media, no more getting up and putting that damn disc into a player. So it's only logical to start putting the major media on it.

The most significant benefit of digitalization has to do with earth itself. As our population grows, our needs and wants are starting to impact the earth's resources in a large way. Forests are being cut down at an enormous rate, our small supplies of fresh water are being polluted by industries and deemed unsafe. Littering from excess packaging is starting to cover our land. Digitalization of media can help slow down the process of destroying our planet. There would be no more need to package DVDs, music cds, software, or games. Stopping this excessive, and unnecessary mass production could be a big helping hand to returning earth to a better state. And who knows, it might help a few people tidy up their cluttered homes!

With every positive solution comes negative ideas. Because of the internet architecture of openness, some people enjoy downloading content without paying, or in any way benefiting the producers/owners. Now, some say this is killing the industry. I stick with the idea that the people who watch the content without giving back their support would not have payed for it in the first place. While people argue that this is a very ignorant way of looking at it, I believe this to be true. The market is not affected if the people who watch the illegally downloaded content were not going to buy it in the first place. I also think of the content as a free trial. Chances are, if someone enjoys the content, they will likely want to support the provider to create more of it. And they might not have otherwise seen it if they hadn't downloaded it. Its a give and take circle that, in my opinion, benefits everyone.

Maybe, we're accusing people of stealing without looking further into the issue. Perhaps the downloading of illegal content is the result of lacking a decent, easy to use, unobtrusive service. Take a look at iTunes. Before iTunes, music was taken off the internet from peer to peer programs like Kazaa. If all people were taking music off the internet with the sole intention of theft (which companies try to make it look like), would iTunes have then boomed? There are many other services coming with the same idea in mind, provide a service with a legal means of downloading content. Yahoo Unlimited is a promising idea based on renting music. There are some services in the works that plan to give away music for free, using instead, advertising revenue to pay for it.

Most of the technology is here already. Most people have a computer in their household. Hard drive storage space is increasing, and bandwidth is becoming cheaper everyday. Consumer internet speeds are increasing as content on the internet demands more speed. We are approaching a tipping point, one which will fall towards virtual instead of physical content. Even if downloading times aren't instant, you can see there is a demand by looking at systems such as netflix. If people wanted their movies right now, they would go to a movie rental store and rent them. Instead, they order online, and are willing to wait for it to arrive in the mail. So, with this attitude in mind, people wouldn't be bothered much if they had to wait a few hours for downloads to finish. Digital content is the future. Its environmentally friendly, and people want it. So, the only question that remains is, how long will the corporate world keep consumers waiting, trying to push away the inevitable? How much money will companies lose staying out of these new markets that are being created across the internet, one of the few markets that has little regards to borders?

Always On

A slow but steady cultural transformation is occurring. People are adopting the values of an "always on, always available" world. The internet is at the middle of this transformation, a behemoth of information that continually grows, and allows easy collaboration at any time. More then ever before, are we able to harness people in an integrated network as the world's largest human supercomputer. When you put the millions of people on the internet together to complete specific tasks, there are endless possibilities. An example is chacha.com, which lets you use a live search guide to help you find what you're looking for. Chacha pays people 5 to 10 dollars an hour to help assist its customers.

The power of the internet is just beginning to be harnessed. If every idle moment of time people spend on the internet could be put towards a purpose, much could be accomplished. The time can be taken from many things people already do everyday, and wouldn't affect anyone's day on the internet by much. Take for instance the ReCAPTCHA project. Captchas are common in our internet world. They act to deter the efforts by spammers and hackers (or crackers, whatever your prefer to call them) to create accounts. Captcha's helped prevent these spammer attacks, which were significantly hurting server loads around the world. Now, bot algorithm's are getting more complex, and some are able to determine some captcha's. The ReCAPTCHA project helps by making the text a little harder to read, thus throwing off the bots. But the main point of ReCAPTCHA is to help document pre-computer age books that could not be read by text recognition software. It's done by using two words for the captcha. The first, an unrecognizable word that the person filling in the captcha determines, and the second word, a known word by the computer to verify you aren't a bot. When quite a few people fill out the first word, the word is known because a few people helped to verify what it is. There are similar ideas in the work for things like videos, pictures, and all sorts of digital content. As the internet expands, these are only going to become more common.

The planet is the most powerful supercomputer, and I can't wait to see what kind of things will be done with this massive power in the future.

A new era.

We are on the brink of a technological revolution. This will be no small change. It will change the entire world around us. How we live, work, play, and inform. It is known as the "web 2.0". It is changing our world into one of mass scale collaboration, a world of openness. Companies, large or small, will have to adapt.

In recent years, companies that are defining the "web 2.0", have flourished. Sites like Digg, Myspace, and Facebook, are changing the way we communicate; sites like Wikipedia, changing the way we store and use information.

Myspace and Facebook are changing the way advertisers work. Before, incentives (contests, etc) had to be given to get information from people -- things like age, work, education, hobbies, and interests. Now, people freely give this away, making it public for all to see.

The idea of a wiki; a source of information available for people to use and edit freely; allows for companies to put together a massive collection of information for their employees to make use of. Some companies are even taking mass collaboration to the next level, showing all their companies hidden secrets, and providing an incentive to help collaborate with them. Incentives vary from employment with the company, to cash prizes for the best solutions or ideas.

Some, however, are against this change in the roles of society. There are those that would rather the people of the world stayed out of business. They believe that giving information away only works against them. They say proprietary company holdings are the only way to go, providing hard earned value for work.

No matter who is right, one thing is certain. The ball has been set in motion, and there is no way to stop it. The era of mass collaboration is upon us, where the consumer is almost another subsection of companies, helping to create things ranging from instruction guides, to mods and other add-ons to products.

Welcome to a new era. Welcome to the "Web 2.0".