Paul Wallbank – Communications Professional
Comms, journalism and writing
What do you say when your web hosting service is down for 16 hours?
A 16 hour outage by hosting service Bluehost knocks the wind out of this site’s sails.
There’s much to say about customer engagement, engineering and management but it will have to wait for another day.
Steve Jobs declared Apple would wage Holy War on Google in 2011 in an effort to secure an online empire
A regular topic of this blog has been the rise of the internet empires that want to lock users into their kingdoms.
On the edges of these empires things can get ugly as the competing groups fight for supremacy and to capture users.
In these wars, no-one was capable of getting uglier that Steve Jobs.
Which makes Steve Jobs’ declaration that 2011 would be a year of Holy War with Google unsurprising.
The statement typical Jobsian hyperbole, but we should under estimate just how serious Apple’s staff would take such a statement.
Apple’s intention to wage ‘holy war’ illustrates just how high the stakes as the online empires try to capture users.
Those Holy Wars and the reason they are being fought is something all of us should keep in mind when we’re asked to choose between Apple, Google or Microsoft.
Microsoft’s task of securing its software was a huge undertaking, one that isn’t over yet.
Microsoft’s task of securing its software was a huge undertaking, one that isn’t over yet.
One of the great, and possibly under recognised, business achievements of the computer age was Bill Gates’ recognition that Microsoft’s online strategy was flawed shortly after releasing Windows 95. A few years later he had to repeat the task when the company found its products were almost dangerously insecure.
In a sprawling account of the company’s response to the security problems at the turn of the century, Life In The Digital Crosshairs, describes how Microsoft’s engineers responded to their then CEO’s call for Trustworthy Computing.
The problems at the time were vast, compounded by Microsoft’s failure to take security seriously – the first version of Windows XP came out without a firewall which ensured thousands of users were quickly infected by the computer worms rampant on many ISPs networks at the time.
As the story tells, it was a long difficult task for Microsoft to change complex and interdependent computer code involving 8,500 of the company’s engineers.
One suspects the cultural challenges were even greater in getting the managers supervising the army of engineers to understand just how serious the security threat was to Microsoft’s users.
The biggest challenge though was Microsoft’s own product line; because the company hadn’t ‘baked’ security into its software, key products like Microsoft Office relied on lax security practices to work properly.
Office and Windows also had the problem of legacy code and applications; one of Microsoft’s selling points over Apple and other competitor systems was that the company took pride in supporting older hardware and software, this in itself creates security risks when programs designed in the MS-DOS days still want to write to the system kernel.
For Microsoft the journey isn’t over, although the shift to cloud computing has changed – and simplified – the company’s security quest by making legacy issues in Office and Windows less important.
Microsoft and Gates’ success in seeing off the threats posed by the internet gave the company another decade of computer industry dominance, however dealing with security issues was nowhere near successful.
In the end however it wasn’t security issues that saw Microsoft lose its dominance; the internet eventually prevailed as Apple revolutionised mobile computing while Amazon and Google improved cloud services.
With Bill Gates reportedly finding himself getting more involved in the company he founded, the challenges of both the internet and security are two that he’s going to be very familiar with. It will be interesting to see what we write about Microsoft in 2022.
Cisco Systems’ Visual Networking Index forecasts M2M data traffic will grow fifty fold in the next four years.
One of the annual events in the tech world is Cisco’s Visual Networking Index, the company’s survey of internet traffic trends.
The numbers, as always, are staggering and this year Cisco are forecasting that global internet traffic will grow by a factor of eleven over the next four years to 190 exabytes – that’s 190,000,000,000,000Mb or the equivalent of 19o billion hard drives.
What’s particularly fascinating about this year’s index Cisco forecast that by 2018 there will be more mobile devices on the planet than people.
Many of those devices will be the sensors and equipment that makes up the Internet of Things (IoT), or Machine to Machine (M2M) technologies and Cisco expects the internet traffic in this area to surge fifty-fold over the next four years.
This is remarkable as most of the M2M devices don’t use much data as the vast majority only need to send out the odd short signal – as opposed to smartphones that download megabytes of information each day.Cisco’s predictions underscore just how pervasive this technology is going to become in the next few years, the challenge for us is to understand how to use and protect the masses of data these systems are going to generate.
Demand media’s downfall offers some hopeful lessons for those who want to see better quality content on the web.
A few years ago content farm Demand Media was being hailed in some quarters as the future of the media industry.
Today its stock is languishing, revenues are falling and any thought that the cheap, low quality writing that Demand Media delivered will be the future of media is laughable.
Variety magazine recently published a feature describing the of the fall of Demand Media with a focus on how Google’s changes to its search engine algorithm undermined the content farm’s busines model. Variety’s story is an interesting case study on not relying on another company for your business plan and extends the hope that low quality writing is not the future of online media.
Demand media evolved from the eHow and eNom businesses, both of which relied on dubious – if not downright dishonest – online practices.
eNom was particularly irritating, basically just registering domain names around popular search terms that led to pages full of advertising that delivered nothing of value to someone searching the web for information on a topic.
It was very profitable for a while though, as Variety reports;
Early on, Demand used eNom’s 1 million generic domain names (such as “3dblurayplayers.com”) to serve up relevant ads to people searching for specific topics. These “domain parking” pages were immensely profitable, generating north of $100,000 per day, according to a former Demand exec who requested anonymity. “That’s $35 million-$40 million per year without doing any work,” the exec said.
The eHow business wasn’t any better, relying on low quality, cheap articles that only worked because they were stuffed full of the keywords that Google would base their search results on.
On January 26 2011 Demand Media went public and the criticism of both the newly listed company and Google became intense.
This story from Business Insider – which ha featured some gushing and dreadful analysis of Demand Media previously – illustrated the problem the company had of being overwhelming dependent on Google, although the writer believed Google were making too much money from content farms to really act against them.
Google’s problem with the content farms was real, the quality of search results was falling and users were finding their pages were full of low value rubbish rather than authoritative sources which opened the search giant’s core business to disruption from Microsoft’s Bing and other search engines. Something had to be done.
Jason Calacanis, whose Mahalo was a competitor to Demand Media, flagged the risks to content farms in a presentation early in February 2011, “the one rule of working with Google is don’t make them look stupid. If you make ‘The Google’ look stupid, they’ll f- you up.” He said. “eHow makes Google look stupid.”
Eventually Google decided they were sick of looking stupid and changed their algorithms and the rules for getting a page one search result suddenly changed.
Demand Media’s business was doomed from the moment Google made that change, as Variety reports;
By April 2011, third-party measurement services were reporting that the Google changes had reduced traffic to Demand sites by as much as 40%. Demand issued a statement that the reports “significantly overstated the negative impact” of the change, but the stock took a dive — plummeting 38% over two weeks — from which it has not recovered.
As Demand Media was affected, so too was the entire Search Engine Optimisation (SEO) industry where thousands of consultants found their strategies of placing low quality pages and link rich website comments now damaged their clients’ businesses.
For web surfers, Google’s change was good news as suddenly search results were relevant again.
Demand Media was, in essence, a transition business that prospered during a brief windows of opportunity that quickly closed along with the company’s prospects.
That window of opportunity was also dependent on someone else’s business strategy, which is always a dangerous position to be in.
Demand Media’s lesson is that while there are opportunities to be had in markets that are being disrupted by new technologies, there’s no guarantees those opportunities will last. What works in SEO, digital media or social marketing today may not work tomorrow.
It’s also a hopeful lesson that websites regurgitating low quality content is only a transition phase in the development of online media and that providing good, original writing and video is the best long term strategy for survival on the net.
Should that lesson be true, then it’s good news for both writers and readers.
Breaking up the internet into different standards would be a backward step, but it might happen.
Could the current internet spying scandals result in the internet become fragmented into different national empires?
Over dinner with President Obama with fourteen other tech industry leaders, Yahoo!’s CEO Marissa Mayer warned that US spying threatens to ‘Balkanize the Internet’, Bloomberg reports.
Mayer has reasons to be worried, the scale of the US National Security Agency’s multiple programs monitoring internet traffic around the world has surprised even the most hard bitten commentator and it is already affecting US technology sales to China.
Coupled with revelations that Britain’s GCHQ was tapping the subsea cables themselves in concert with US agencies almost every national government is now pondering the fact that, as an invention of the US military, the internet itself is open to being misused by its creators.
As online communications become more critical to nation’s economies and security it’s understandable that governments would be considering how to make their networks more hardened to interception or interference and creating whole new protocols outside current standards is one way of doing that.
With the industrial sector increasingly being connected through the internet of machines the stakes suddenly become much higher, as the Iranian government discovered with the Stuxnet worm that crippled the country’s nuclear research program.
After Stuxnet every country and business with critical systems exposed to the internet is now working on hardening those systems from similar attacks.
Until recently, almost all the profits from the internet’s growth have gone to US technology companies so its not a surprise that Facebook chief Sheryl Sandberg and Google chairman Eric Schmidt were with Mayer when she expressed her concerns to President Obama.
A balkanisation of the internet along national lines and industrial sectors is bad for US business which already struggles to get traction in non-Western markets like China and India.
The irony is though that Yahoo!, Google and Facebook are all trying to balkanize the internet themselves in locking users into their own networks.
While that’s a concern for internet users, it appears those commercial walled gardens don’t seem to be working.
Yahoo!’s attempt to monopolise their corner of the web has clearly failed and it’s appearing that Google’s attempts to take over social media are failing despite forcing YouTube users onto Google+ while Facebook is beginning to buckle under the sheer weight of its own News Feed.
Common wisdom about internet markets is that you have to be the number one provider in your niche to succeed, what we may well be seeing is those niches are smaller than we thought and leadership in one sector doesn’t automatically guarantee success in another.
As Deloitte’s Eric Openshaw told this blog last week, ““one way or another, these things can be problematic in the short run but typically over time they are resolved.”
One of the reasons for the internet being one of the most successful technologies is that it was standardised relatively early, it didn’t have the battles over industry standards like the AC versus DC electricity arguments between Edison and Tesla, or the insanity of different railway gauges plaguing countries and international trade.
Jonathan Swift parodied these technological arguments in Gulliver’s Travels where the main point of contention between the warring empires of Lilliput and Blefuscu was over which end boiled eggs should be cracked.
It would be a great economic loss if security concerns or commercial opportunities saw the internet follow those examples and saw the online world carved up into many little empires.
Should it happen, we deserve a future Jonathan Swift to parody us mercilessly.
While the online scams evolve, the venal stupidity of victims doesn’t
The notorious “419 scams” have been around since the early days of the consumer internet.
419 scams are the elaborate internet frauds that try to convince people they unexpectedly come into money. Once a gullible victim takes the bait, they are duped into paying a range of ‘facilitation fees’ and costs that drains their saving.
The term 419 scam comes from the Nigerian criminal code that covers this crime, which was appropriate as most — although not all — of these emails originated from the country.
For a while in the early 2000s, internet users became used to receiving a few 419 scam emails every day but by the middle of the decade they largely dried up as the even the most gullible and greedy idiots became wise to the schemes.
That’s not to say they have completely vanished, this morning quite a distasteful one landed in my inbox.
Greetings,
I wish to seek your assistance to execute a business deal. I am Paul Williams a Contract Agent based in London. I require your consent to present you as next of kin to a client of mine, who died along with his wife and Two kids in the Asian Typhoon Haiyan in the Philippines leaving behind a large sum of money without a next of kin. With your co-operation and information available to me you can make a claim on the funds as the next of kin to my deceased client. After release of the funds to you by the financial institution where it is lodged, we can share according to a percentage we agree upon. If you may be of assistance, please reply for further co-operation.
Best Regards,Paul Williams.
It’s unlikely that Paul Williams exists and even if he did it’s unlikely he’d have anything to do with this unsavory scam that most people would immediate bin when they receive it.
Binning the message was my reaction as well, but as I was about to, it occurred to me that there are enough venal, stupid people in the world who would agree to be involved in such a deal.
No doubt if you asked them they’d say defrauding the deceased family’s estate is a victimless crime as the money would only end up with the government anyway, these people would swear blind they are honest, honourable folk and no doubt they would think they are rather clever.
It’s worth reflecting that dishonest, venal and somewhat dim people do occasionally get their come-uppance in today’s world.
Online security problems are chronic and costing our economies billions claim researchers.
“No country is cyber-ready” warns Melissa Hathaway, author the Cyber-Readiness Report.
Hathaway’s warning is that the economic benefits of the internet are being lost to the various vulnerabilities in our information infrastructure.
Dutch research company TNO claims that the Netherlands lost up to 2% of their GDP to cybercrime in 2010 and Hathaway claims similar losses are being incurred in other developed countries.
Supporting Hathaway’s views at a function in Sydney today, Cisco System’s Senior Vice President and Chief Security Officer, John Stewart, made a frightening observation about corporate networks.
“Every single customer we have checked with, and these are the Fortune 2000, has high threat malware operating in their environment – every single one of them.”
So the bad guys are in our networks and causing real economic damage. The question for businesses and governments is how do we manage this threat and mitigate any losses?
On our more intimate level, how do we manage our own systems and online behaviour to limit our personal or business losses?
Hathaway makes the point that the internet was never intended to do the job we now expect it to do and as consequence security was never built into the net’s design.
Today, we rely upon the internet regardless of its lack of inbuilt security. With everyone from governments through to organised crime and petty scammers wanting to peek at our data, we have to start taking security far more seriously.
The online bad guys are now professionals and we have to start taking them very seriously
“Fifteen years ago we saw a thousand types a malware a month, now we see a three thousand a day,” states Richard Cohen, Threat Operations Manager of Sophos Lab during a tour of the company’s head office outside Oxford in England last week.
That one statistic alone describes the scale of online security risks facing every computer user. Making matters worse is that the attackers have moved from enthusiastic amateurs to committed professionals.
A particularly notable change for home and small businesses has been the risk of ‘ransomware’ where a computer’s data is held hostage by the bad guys until an unlock code is paid for.
Like many things in the computer world, ransomware isn’t new however the latest breed uses the latest cryptographic tools.
“Now there’s money involved, there’s serious effort,” says Sophos Labs’ Vice President Simon Reed. “The quality of malware has gone up.”
The early versions of ransomware were a joke, usually just being a scary opening screen warning people of the FBI or a similar agency had detected illegal downloads on their computer. Today – according to Sophos’ researchers – the new breed of malware features high level encryption that locks away data fairly comprehensively.
While the researchers at Sophos were briefing me on the online risks they see, on the other side of the world Eugene Kasperski, founder of Russia’s most successful computer security company, was addressing an Australian National Press Club lunch on the state of the anti-virus market.
“Traditional criminals are stupid,” Kasperski told the lunch. “Computer criminals are different. They are geeks; geeks with broken minds.”
The message to homes and small business from both Kasperski and Sophos is quite clear – you have to take online security seriously. Start doing so now.
Can cities standardise the way they connect to the internet of things?
One of the challenges for governments with smart city technologies is that most administrations don’t know the questions to ask about them, the City Protocol initiative aims to address this problem.
During the recent Internet of Things conference in Barcelona, Barcelona Deputy Mayor Antoni Vives discussed the objectives of the City Protocol Initiative.
“The solutions for our problems are more or less the same,” Vives says. “The problems cities have is they are too weak to talk to big corporations to ask for the solutions we need.”
“So the idea is to set up standard solutions in the way the internet protocol did through agreements between cities around the world and then through these agreements we set up standards that can be developed anywhere around the world in a very cheap way in a physical way that can improve people’s lives.”
The cities protocol already has fifty cities signed up to the protocol and partnerships with corporations ranging from Cisco to Schneider and Microsoft along with universities such as the MIT, the London School of Economics and the University of Chicago
Barcelona’s city government was instrumental in setting up the protocol following a visit to Cisco’s head office in 2012.
“We went to San Francisco and we explained to these guys, ‘we have a plan for our city, why don’t you join us?’ Provided that we convert this plan for Barcelona into something applicable and scalable for any city in the world.”
“What you have in Barcelona is something we want to scale and replicate anywhere in the world,” Vires proudly states. “The technology you see in Barcelona is something you’re going to see in ten years time in Addis Ababa, Quito, Johannesburg or Moscow. That’s the real revolution.”
Vires sees the smart city technologies changing the way councils and governments work with citizens, “we have discovered that rather than going from the administration to the citizens, going from the citizens to the people improves our own models. We never forget these guys are the people who pay our wages.”
“If you put a device in the city that can talk to them, then people are going to interact with the city in a way they have never done.”
As well as seeing it changing the way governments communicate with people, Vires is enthusiastic about what technology can do for his council delivering services to residents
“I have to have the best tools in my hands to deliver a better quality of life for my people.”
There are some risks though with the smart city technologies, particularly that of inclusion with less advantaged, immigrant or older age groups. Vires tells a story to illustrate how this is a priority for the city.
“We installed the smart bus stop,” says Vires. “There was an old woman and this bus stop has slots to charge mobiles and that old woman went to the slot, took a penny from her pocket and tried to put the penny into the slot as she thought she had to put a coin into the slot to make it work.”
“We have to make sure that that old woman understands that device is there to serve her, not to put coins into but to give her a better service.”
The old lady’s story illustrates the challenge facing all governments in implementing new technologies in making sure that everyone has access to the new services. Addressing the problem of equal access will probably be one of the greatest tasks facing the Cities Protocol team.
Broadband internet can only drive economic growth if society and business can embrace change
The assertion that internet connectivity drives economic growth is largely taken for granted although getting the maximum benefit from a broadband network investment may require more than stringing fibre cables or building wireless base stations.
A key document that supports the link between economic growth and broadband penetration is the International Telecommunication Union’s 2012 Impact of Broadband on the Economy report.
While the reports authors aren’t wholly convinced of the direct links between economic growth and broadband penetration, they do see a clear correlation between the two factors.
One of the areas that disturbed the ITU report editors were the business, government and cultural attitudes towards innovation.
The economic impact of broadband is higher when promotion of the technology is combined with stimulus of innovative businesses that are tied to new applications. In other words, the impact of broadband is neither automatic nor homogeneous across the economic system.
For South Korea, internet innovation is a problem as the New York Times reports. Restrictions on mapping technologies, curfews on school age children and the requirement for all South Koreans to use their real names on the net are all cited as factors in stifling local innovation.
In reading the New York Times article, it’s hard not to suspect the South Korean government is engaging in some digital protectionism, which is ironic seeing the benefits the country has reaped from globalised manufacturing over the last thirty years.
The problem for South Korea is that rolling out high speed broadband networks are of little use if local laws, culture or business practices impede adoption of the services. It’s as if the US or Germany built their high speed roads but insisted that cars have a flag waver walking in front of them.
Indeed it may well be that South Korea’s broadband networks are as useful to economic growth as Pyongyang’s broad boulevards just over the border.
Similar problems face other countries with Google’s high speed broadband network in the US so far not attracting the expected business take up and innovation, although it is early days yet and there are some encouraging signs among the Kansas City startup community.
In Australia, the troubled National Broadband Network has struggled to articulate the business uses for the service beyond 1990s mantras about remote workplaces and telehealth – much of the reason for that has been the failure of Australian businesses to think about how broadband can change their industries.
Like Japan’s bridges to nowhere, big infrastructure projects look good but the poorly planned ones – particularly those no-one knows how to use – are a spectacular waste of money.
Hopefully the fibre networks being rolled out won’t be a waste of money, but unless industries start using the web properly then much of the investment will be wasted.
Internet cookies are dying, what will replace them?
On the last ABC radio spot we looked at how our data is being tracked, in the following 702 Sydney program with Linda Mottram we looked at the role of Internet cookies and online privacy.
Cookies – tiny text files that store visitors’ details on websites – have long been the mainstay of online commerce as they track the behaviour of web surfers.
For media companies, Cookies have become a key way of identifying and understanding their readers making these web tracking tools an essential part of an already revenue challenged online news model.
Cookies also present security and privacy risks as, like all Big Data, the information held within them can be cross-referenced with other sources to create a picture of and often identify an internet users.
These online data crumbs often follow us around the web as advertising platforms and other services, particularly social media sites, monitor our behaviour and the European Union’s Directive on Privacy and Electronic Communications is the first step by regulators to crack down on the use of cookies.
Similar moves are afoot in the US as regulators start to formulate rules around the use of Cookies, in an Australian context, the National Privacy Principles apply however they are of limited protection as most cookies are not considered to be ‘identifiable data’, the same get out used by US government agencies to monitor citizens’ communications.
Generally these rules promise to be so cumbersome for online services Google is looking at getting rid of cookies altogether .
Ditching cookies gives Google a great deal of power with its existing ways of tracking users and ties into Eric Scmidt’s stated aim of making the company’s Google Plus service an identity service that verifies we are who we say we are online.
Whether Google does succeed in becoming the web’s definitive identity service remains to be seen, we are though in a time where the questions of what is acceptable in tracking our online behaviour are being examined.
For the media companies and advertising, putting the control of online analytics in the hands of one or two companies may also add another level of middle man in a market where margins are already thin if not non-existent.
It may well be that we look back on the time when we were worried about internet cookies tracking us as being a more innocent time.
