November 23rd, 2009

Google goes all-in with an open source cloud

Posted by Dana Blankenhorn @ 7:13 am

Categories: Cloud Computing, General, Google, Internet, telecom, values

Tags: Google Inc., Open Standard, Open Source, Dana Blankenhorn

Google quietly announced last week that its cloud will run nothing but open source software.

This is a big deal, but let’s first admit why Google did it.

As I have written many times, Google has a big cost advantage when it comes to delivering Internet resources.

It’s like America’s nuclear advantage during the Cold War. Anyone who sought to compete with America in terms like throw-weight would bankrupt themselves. President Reagan encouraged this competition and the Soviet Union bankrupted itself.

So as Google enters the cloud computing wars with outfits like Amazon and Salesforce.com, it is to its advantage that there be no proprietary software advantage. On a level playing field it dominates. They’re the New York Yankees without a salary cap.

Openness, represented by open source and Internet standards, are all to Google’s advantage. This is why opponents of open standards, like Scott Cleland, go to such rhetorical lengths to claim that open standards are, in fact, proprietary. If open standards are proprietary you can set closed standards without harm to the market.

But open standards set terms of competition that advantage the low-cost producer of bits and processing. The question for policymakers, both public and private, is what the terms of competition will be, not who wins.

Cleland and other Bell apologists want their clients to win. Thus they support regulation based on scarcity, under which the winner is the outfit that can hire the most apologists. I own no Google stock, and I make no money from Google. Never have. Probably never will. (If I do I’ll let you know.)

We should set terms of competition that advantage consumers, not particular producers, and that reward plenty rather than scarcity. By that standard Google’s dominance is a fair one, fairly obtained, and so long as it’s not abused it’s a good thing.

In making its cloud open source, Google shows it understands this.

November 23rd, 2009

Tim O'Reilly and the Cassandra act

Posted by Dana Blankenhorn @ 6:38 am

Categories: Apple, General, Google, Internet, Microsoft, business models, content, mass market, telecom

Tags: ESPN, Web, Tim O'Reilly, Threat, News Corp., Mobile Telephony, Internet Service Providers (ISPs), Internet, Channel Management, Marketing

Tim O’Reilly delivered a dire warning at his Web 2.0 Expo over the weekend.

The Web is under threat from closed applications, from Google and Apple to Microsoft and Amazon, and from content vendors like News Corp. building moats and raising high the drawbridges.

I felt great sympathy for Tim, reading his words. I issued similar warnings over the dot-boom, starting from when I launched A-Clue.Com as a weekly newsletter in 1997, having been laid off from CMP’s NetGuide.

Watch out, be wary, I wrote. This Internet commerce thing is just a bubble. It’s going to pop and all will be carnage.

Turns out there is little value in being Cassandra (right, from Wikipedia). When the dot-boom burst, which I date from AOL’s purchase by Time-Warner, it did me no good at all.

I went from having 17 writing gigs to zero. I had joked during the boom that I would gladly write for nothing — in 2002 and 2003 I did. Ha-ha.

The point is that, while I was right, I was powerless to do anything about it.

Tim O’Reilly is not powerless.

And the first thing he needs to do is get straight about the issues.

1. The “threat” from Google and Apple is a feature, not a bug. Mobile telephony has been wholly proprietary from its birth 25 years ago. There is not and never has been a mobile Internet, just whatever data carriers wished to let pass on their networks.
2. It has always been possible to erect paywalls and registration walls. The New England Journal of Medicine and many science journals hide much of their content behind registration. Publishers like England’s The Spectator are constantly trying to get paid.
3. Clouds like those of Amazon and Google may only support software their owners choose to support. Trying to make clouds vanilla discriminates against rocky road and tutti-frutti.

There have been proprietary threats to the Internet practically since the moment the Web was spun. That’s what the browser wars were about. Microsoft was going to add proprietary hooks to Internet Explorer and we’d all be gutted like fish on a line.

Since the Web was spun, there have also been elite audiences, narrow niches for whom payment and registration is a business advantage. Not everyone wants the hoi polloi coming in at all hours so they can spend the next day digging quarters out of the couches. Velvet ropes hold a business model.

So long as I’m not forced to buy News Corp. content, in other words, there is no threat from News Corp. hiding its face from me.

On the other hand, there are real threats O’Reilly didn’t mention. ESPN, for instance.

When ISPs are charged for content, and those ISPs have monopolistic control of their subscribers, that’s a real problem. ESPN has quietly engineered this. Don’t like sports but need a cable modem? You are buying ESPN360 whether you want to or not. Every month some of your ISP bill goes to Disney (ESPN’s owners).

I’m sure News Corp. and every other big content provider would like a taste of that gravy. And it would do little good for subscribers to try and disconnect Comcast en masse — where you gonna go?

It’s the proprietary control of the last mile, and the use of that control to force users into buying things they may not want, that is the big threat to the Internet. That’s a feature of the wireless world, but we can change it. It’s a product of the Bell-cable duopoly, but we can change that, too.

Focus on the real dangers, Tim. You have the power to make change if you focus on what’s real and use your influence.

Otherwise you’re like Holly Hunter in Broadcast News, or hundreds of other working journalists. It must be wonderful to always be right, she’s told.

No, she replies. It’s horrible.

And if you can’t do anything about it, it is.

November 19th, 2009

ChromeOS says tear down this network regulation wall

Posted by Dana Blankenhorn @ 6:05 am

Categories: Cloud Computing, General, Google, Government, Internet, LANs and WANs, Legal, business models, mass market, politics

Tags: Software, Network, Chip, Wall, ChromeOS, Unleash Moore, Network Technology, Semiconductors, Networking, Hardware

An Australian friend wrote yesterday with a question:

I really can’t see the point of a cloud-based OS for the general user. The added cost in using it doesn’t seem worthwhile.

It would take me over 6 months to upload my data at my connection speed not to mention that ISPs here in Australia have now included uploads as part of your total usage which for me would be exceeded for those 6 months.

So can I ask - why choose ChromeOS ?

These are good questions. They have been vexing me ever since IBM and Ubuntu launched their Africa-only Linux, based heavily on network use, a few months ago.

It got me to thinking about the 1980s, the dawn of the Windows era.

Each new release of software pushed hardware beyond its limits. To get the latest new features, to review new software, I had to buy a new top-of-the-line PC every few years. Software sold hardware.

This helped make more than Bill Gates rich. It delivered fortunes to the entire semiconductor ecosystem — from box makers like Michael Dell to chip makers like Andy Grove of Intel to chip equipment makers like Jim Morgan of Applied Materials — everyone sold everything they could make at a fat profit.

All of today’s current trends — you can add clouds and the iPhone to this — are pushing demand for networking much as chip demand was pushed then.

What will meet that demand is just what met it then — Moore’s Law. Not Moore’s Law as Moore wrote it, but as it has been applied in networking technologies like optical fiber and radios.

Thanks to Dense Wavelength Division Multiplexing, a single optical fiber today can carry many times the data it carried a decade ago. Thanks to Digital Signal Processors we can do the same thing with wireless data.

What is holding back network capacity is politics. We still think of it in terms of telephony, a regulated industry managed for scarcity. It’s not that way, and hasn’t been that way for a long time.

Throw out the old rule book and write a new one, based not on scarcity but abundance. Let the competition to serve more-and-more bits drive entrepreneurs to new fortunes around the world. Open more spectrum to unlicensed use, like WiFi is regulated, demand wholesaling of the last mile, and the bits you unleash will make us all rich again.

That’s what today’s software is telling us. That’s the message of ChromeOS. Unleash Moore’s Law in networks, unshackle competition to provide faster-and-faster data services, and watch the economy of the world take off again.

With ChromeOS Google is making the same call on networks Microsoft made on chips two decades ago. It’s a call that demands a response, not just from the market but from governments.

Deregulate. Free the bits. Here and around the world.

Or, as Ronald Reagan might say, Mr. Genachowski, tear down this wall.

November 18th, 2009

Google-Microsoft rivalry on with ChromeOS launch

Posted by Dana Blankenhorn @ 6:04 am

Categories: General, Google, Internet, Linux, Linux Desktop OS, Linux Laptop, Microsoft, Strategy, marketing

Tags: Google Inc., Microsoft Corp., Web Browser, ChromeOS, Chrome, Linux, Netbooks, Nettops & MIDs, Web Browsers, Operating Systems, UNIX

The daily competition between Google and Microsoft becomes ever-more direct this week, with Google hosting a demo of its ChromeOS tomorrow, right after Microsoft’s Professional Development conference.

ChromeOS is Google’s version of Linux for netbooks, much as Android is its Linux for handhelds. It is a version of Bill Gates’ nightmares from 15 years ago, as Netscape was rising, visions that led directly to the case of U.S. vs. Microsoft.

Microsoft got through that crisis unscathed in a corporate sense, but its image was transformed from that of a user-friendly upstart to that of “an implacable force for evil,” as one comedy show said recently, exemplified by the famous Boardwatch cover of Bill Gates as a member of the Borg, the Star Trek bad guys.

The fear, old programming hands will tell you, was that Netscape would turn its Mozilla browser into a full-fledged operating system that, because of its dominance of the browser space, could beat Windows in the market.

Chrome is a lot like that. It is centered on the browser, which abstracts the complexity of Linux from the user. And it’s designed to load fast, a real Achilles Heel for Windows on a netbook. An early version could be available for download next week.

When you’re paying $300 for your machine, you don’t want to wait 10 minutes for the thing to start, and you don’t want to be paying a lot for your software, either. ChromeOS is designed to fix both problems, so I am looking forward to it.

The hope is that the industry which supports ChromeOS will make up in services what it loses in up-front fees. And Google will be able to tie all its online services to ChromeOS, increasing its market share in areas like Mail where it is not yet dominant.

So, Mr. Bill, is resistance futile?

November 16th, 2009

Should search engines pay tribute to content?

Posted by Dana Blankenhorn @ 2:43 pm

Categories: Google, Internet, business models, content, mass market

Tags: Google Inc., Search Engine, Rupert Murdoch, Journal, Internet, Search, Construction, Dana Blankenhorn

Tom Foremski, one of the good guys here at ZDNet, is out with a piece suggesting that Google fork over whatever Rupert Murdoch wants in order to keep indexing Fox News.

His argument is that losing access to regularly-updated content would be a big hole in Google’s business model, which is based on making everything out there available.

I have two problems with that:

1. If one publisher can force Google to pay for a link, so can every other publisher. Blackmail never ends.
2. Publishers have tried this before and failed. Including Murdoch.

I think the first point is more important. Foremski argues that newspapers get little traffic from Google. This is true, mainly because, as he notes, most still haven’t got a Clue when it comes to the Internet.

Google has already taken their wire service traffic away, signing side deals with major wire services like AP, posting those stories on Google pages, paying back the ad revenue. The only newspaper content left is local or beat-specific. Most traffic to those stories comes from the local area.

So if the traffic flow is modest, why should Google be paying? Just to protect its reputation?

There is no need to argue the point. We can run an experiment.

Let Bing or Yahoo pay Murdoch, and let Murdoch put robots.txt files on all his properties, keeping them away from Google’s crawlers. See what happens. If there’s real market share to be gained here, Google’s competitors will be happy to buy it.

On to the second point. Both The Wall Street Journal and The New York Times have tried the paid model. The Journal maintains it, but offers links to the full-text of its stories, through Google. The Times gave up its Times Select program as a money-loser.

Yes, The Journal began its program before Google bought it. But I also remember a time, about a decade ago, when Fox site managers were transferring every link deep into their site to the home page. It was maddening. They stopped.

There’s some basic math at work here. The smaller your circulation base, the more specialized it is, the better off you’ll do with either a paid model or a registration model.

Lots and lots of journals allow only access to abstracts if you’re not a registered user. The New England Journal of Medicine is an example. And there are many publications only available to paying customers, who are notified of updates via e-mail.

The problem is that if you want a mass audience on the Internet, you have to make yourself available to a mass audience. Newspapers are mass circulation publications. Throwing up registration windows or pay walls hasn’t worked for them.

But, again, Murdoch (and every other publisher) is perfectly free to try. Just write a simple robots.txt file forbidding indexing. Poof, you’re invisible to the search engines’ spiders.

There’s no real controversy here, IMHO. Publishers are free to conduct what experiments they want with Google, either seeking to tweak it to get more audience, or block it to access a smaller, elite audience.

History says Murdoch is barking at the Moon. But he likes to write his own history. Let him try.

November 13th, 2009

The stupid network will get a hearing

Posted by Dana Blankenhorn @ 7:07 am

Categories: Freedom2Connect, General, Government, Infrastructure, Internet, LANs and WANs, telecom

Tags: Network, Networking, Dana Blankenhorn

Advocates of transforming network regulation from Bell services to dumb bits will get a hearing from the FCC, as David Isenberg, author of the classic Rise of the Stupid Network, has joined the agency as an expert advisor.

(Picture taken in 2004 from Isenberg’s Isen.com Web site.)

Isenberg will be part of the team that will deliver the National Broadband Plan to Congress in February. He wrote on his blog that, as a result of his agency assignment his annual conference on broadband reform, Freedom2Connect, will be postponed.

A bit of disclosure. I covered the 2006 Freedom2Connect conference in Washington for ZDNet.

In the Stupid Network essay, which he wrote while at AT&T in 1997, Isenberg argued that the most efficient network is controlled at the edge, with a design based on the idea of plenty rather than scarcity, and transport based on the needs of the data.

The idea, he wrote, was that the network did not need intelligence at the center, that it should just “deliver the bits, stupid.” Hence the stupid network.

The problem is that while the stupid network is fine engineering, great for users and consumer equipment suppliers, it doesn’t leave much for the telephone company to do but move bits. And Isenberg wrote at a time when the bit-moving market was highly competitive, with prices falling every few months.

Thus the phone companies have argued against the stupid network. They have sought to install gear within the parts of the Internet they control to guarantee Quality of Service, to distinguish between bits based on protocol or what the customer is paying to move them, and to stop bad bits before they arrive at a user’s desk.

“Those are nice bits there, a shame if something happened to them.” And the phone company is Santa Claus, deciding which bits are naughty and which are nice.

The problem with this is it slows the network, and creates a barrier to entry for innovation, which must win permission from the network operator in order to reach the market. It is also redundant if customer equipment can handle tasks previously done by the intelligent network.

The Internet, as it exists today, is essentially a stupid network.

Cellular networks, you will note, are completely different from stupid networks. Such networks are all centrally controlled, with the carrier defining different bits as separate services, controlling who can sell what, and taking a cut on every transaction.

Isenberg left AT&T in 1998 as “Distinguished Member of the Technical Staff” but has been better known as mud, Voldemort and Who’s He at Bell offices ever since. (This is especially true for those who work as Bell lobbyists.)

Isenberg will just be one member of the agency’s National Broadband Task Force, one voice out of many. The FCC is also taking public comment online and holding hearings.

But at least his voice will be heard.

November 9th, 2009

Where should Mozilla go from here?

Posted by Dana Blankenhorn @ 8:48 am

Categories: Distributions, General, Google, Infrastructure, Internet, Strategy

Tags: Google Inc., Mozilla Firefox, Mozilla Corp., Web Browsers, Internet, Dana Blankenhorn

Five years into Firefox, the Mozilla Foundation’s plans seem mainly geared to an aggressive release schedule, so that the browser can compete with Google Chrome.

There is irony here, because the bulk of Mozilla’s income comes from Google, in the form of royalties on the Google search box which sits on the upper-right corner of the program’s interface.

Thus we have a browser created to stop the Microsoft monopoly pushing what some say is the next dangerous monopoly, that of Google.

Firefox is not Mozilla’s only project. There is the Thunderbird e-mail client, the Bugzilla bug tracking system, and SeaMonkey, which combines Firefox and Thunderbird with Web development tools and chat.

But Firefox is what Mozilla is known for, and most of its work, and that of its add-on makers, is devoted to Firefox and the technologies that emerged from it.

Firefox has transformed the Web, by creating real competition to Microsoft’s Internet Explorer. The question to ask today, however, is where does Mozilla go from here?

• Can Mozilla expand its funding sources to become truly independent of Google?
• Can Mozilla create real market share outside the browser?
• Should Mozilla be focused on browser share, or leave that to Google Chrome and concentrate instead on HTML-related technologies?
• What is Mozilla, in the end? What does the Foundation want to be?

These are the questions born of success. They are not attacks on Mozilla, but the most successful experiment always raises more questions than it answers. Mozilla is, as they say when a soccer team is attacking, “asking the questions.” Which questions should it be asking?

Where, then, does Mozilla go from here? Now that certainties have disappeared, how does its dreams survive? In an open source world, these are not just questions for the Foundation’s directors. They are also questions for you.

November 3rd, 2009

Skype plays footsie with open source

Posted by Dana Blankenhorn @ 6:05 am

Categories: Applications, Distributions, General, Infrastructure, Internet, VOIP, telecom, wireless

Tags: Skype Technologies S.A., Linux, Open Source, Operating Systems, Software, Dana Blankenhorn

As I wrote earlier today, when something goes open source we should ask how.

So in contrast with Yahoo’s open sourcing of Traffic Server, let’s talk about Skype’s “open source” move.

Yahoo was trying to build value from community. Skype is trying an embrace and extend strategy like that of Blackboard.

To its credit Skype is being frank on that.

Yes, there’s an open source version of Linux client being developed. This will be a part of larger offering, but we can’t tell you much more about that right now. Having an open source UI will help us get adopted in the “multicultural” land of Linux distributions, as well as on other platforms and will speed up further development. We will update you once more details are available.

It’s a half-cheer for open source.

All Skype really plans to open source is a Linux version of its client. The protocol remains proprietary. So if you have a Linux phone (Moblin, Android, etc.) and want to support Skype’s proprietary protocol on your new hardware, you can.

This is the first technology move by Skype since eBay sold it to private investors for $2 billion , followed by assorted legal shenanigans. Everyone involved in that deal wants to protect that value.

But telephony is a low-bandwidth application. Its value going forward shouldn’t be voice as-such, but the integration of voice with other computer applications. In that world being wholly proprietary is a disadvantage. But opening up completely may be seen as giving away the goose that lays golden eggs.

Skype is caught east of the rock and west of the hard place. It knows it needs an open source strategy, but it fears giving itself away.

My view is this is not going to end well.

November 3rd, 2009

Yahoo does right by Traffic Server

Posted by Dana Blankenhorn @ 5:45 am

Categories: Applications, Cloud Computing, Development, Distributions, Events, General, Infrastructure, Internet

Tags: Yahoo! Inc., Apache Software Foundation, Server, Traffic Server, Cloud Computing, Open Source, Virtualization, Hardware, Dana Blankenhorn

It’s easy to become obsessive over whether a piece of code is open source.

How code becomes open source  can be just as important. Is it being given the resources and sponsorship necessary to grow? Or is it being tossed over the side of a sinking ship?

By those standards, Yahoo has done its Traffic Server, acquired early this decade along with Inktomi, a solid service, placing the code with Apache.

The code is available right now from Apache’s incubator. This brings the number of incubator projects to 36.

Traffic Server is designed to optimize Web sites by caching popular content at the network edge, closer to users. It’s not something Google needs — they have their own solution — but it could be very useful for relatively new, fast-growing sites. It can keep them from going down when everyone “rushes to the rail” for access.

The software is being released in time for ApacheCon, which plans a Meetup on the software at 8 PST tonight. If you’re at the Con go to Room 4. There you can get the lowdown on features, performance and history from people who have actually written code.

Shelton Shugar of Yahoo told CNET’s Stephen Shankland that Yahoo hopes Traffic Server grows like Hadoop, the cloud computing technology that has since spawned the start-up Cloudera.

What do you think it can be?

November 2nd, 2009

Mozilla goes back to the beta with Firefox 3.6

Posted by Dana Blankenhorn @ 6:43 am

Categories: Development, Distributions, General, Internet, mass market

Tags: Mozilla Firefox, Beta, Mozilla Corp., Web Browsers, Internet, Dana Blankenhorn

Barely four months after launching Firefox 3.5, Firefox has shipped its first beta version of Firefox 3.6.

Mozilla takes release numbers seriously. As our own Stephen Shankland notes, this is not Firefox 4, nor is it Firefox 3.5.x. It’s being pushed as a minor tweak, one with no visible user interface changes.

There are two ways to look at this.

1. Oh goody. Mozilla is increasing the pace at which it delivers updates and upgrades.
2. Oh bother. Does this mean Firefox 3.5 is buggy and insecure?

Among the features in the new release:

• Personas, a set of “skins” for the browser surround of menus.
• Alerts on delivery of new plug-ins.
• Support for full-screen native video.
• Support for WOFF fonts.
• New support for CSS, DOM and HTML5.

If you have ever thought to yourself, “gee, I’m not a programmer, and I can barely afford my daily bread, how can I help an open source project,” here is your answer. Download this buggy code and report on what’s wrong so it can be made right.

No excuses if you’re Basque or Czech or Georgian. This beta has you covered. Yes, even if you’re Telugan, the new Firefox beta understands you. Download it now.

Oh, and feel free to complain below.

November 2nd, 2009

Wordpress picks up college newspapers with CoPress

Posted by Dana Blankenhorn @ 5:35 am

Categories: General, Internet, business models, content, education, publishing

Tags: College, Wordpress, Content Management System, CoPress, Content Management, Enterprise Software, Software, Dana Blankenhorn

Drupal may be grabbing headlines by becoming the CMS of the White House, but WordPress is bound to be the CMS of a future President thanks to a deal it signed with CoPress.

CoPress, the brainchild of former University of Oregon editor Daniel Bachhuber, aims to build a vertical of college papers within the CMS market, with managed hosting and training.

(The original Oregon Duck mascot image was trademarked by The Walt Disney Co. Can you kids guess who it is?)

Bachhuber told Poynter Online that 21 colleges have already signed up, including the papers of Central Michigan, Michigan State, and Cal State Fullerton.

Papers now have a choice between rolling their own solution, joining CoPress, or working with the College Media Network, whose College Publisher is given away free in exchange for banner ad space.

This means free is battling open source directly within the college paper market. In addition to comparing features, CoPress is also arguing against CMN’s latest upgrade, and pointing out that it is building a community around contemporaries rather than delivering a top-down solution.

My own career in college journalism seems a world away from all this. During my freshman year at Rice the paper was actually set with hot type from a Linotype. They later switched to a photo-typesetting solution in which formatted type was printed and then glued to a piece of cardboard with pink plastic cut-outs showing where photos would go.

Before that, I broke away from my high school newspaper to create an opinion-based start-up, which leads to the real challenge facing college journalists in today’s online world, namely competing in their markets with every entrepreneur on campus.

If your start-up costs are nearly nothing what is the benefit of being the “official” college paper Web site?

October 26th, 2009

News Corp. prepares to destroy more online value

Posted by Dana Blankenhorn @ 7:17 am

Categories: General, Google, Internet, business models, content, mass market, video

Tags: News Corp., OpenOffice, Social Networking, Open Source, Office Suites, Software, Online Communications, Marketing, Advertising & Promotion, Dana Blankenhorn

One thing I like about News Corp. is their utter online cluelessness.

One word. Myspace. When News Corp. paid $580 million for MySpace’s parent in 2005 it was the undisputed leader in social networking.  Now it’s an also ran.

News Corp.’s Photobucket once ruled online photo sharing. Now Flickr is catching up. Its Scout.com and Foxsports are being pushed hard by Rivals.Com and ESPN.

The main reason? News Corp. is impatient, it tries to monetize everything quickly, and thinks its unique content is worth paying for. No one’s unique content is worth paying for when there are ample alternatives.

So now News Corp. is pushing to ruin another potential online gold mine, Hulu. News Corp. owns 45% of Hulu, and is now screaming that it will make users pay for access, just as it will make them pay for access to everything else it owns.

The problem is this idea of make them. You can’t make people wear underpants online. When you charge people for something — anything — you cut your potential traffic by 90% or more. You become invisible to search engines, except for your main page, so you have to flog your own stuff.

Most of News Corp. is very bad at the whole competition thing anyway. Its whole schtick is to push a specific sensibility, to have a monopoly on that sensibility, but its online efforts don’t have that sensibility. They could monetize that sensibility if they wanted to play the niche, but instead they try to monetize what everyone else gives away.

If people really love Glenn Beck, in other words, you can make them pay for Glenn Beck. But you can’t make them pay for something they can get free down the street. Like news. Or sports. Or TV clips.

You can’t force the market. If you’re selling something others are giving away they won’t buy from you. The price you charge must be related to what everyone else charges. And if you try to make everyone else charge it’s called collusion.

What News Corp. is trying to do is like buying OpenOffice and sticking a $495 price tag on the box. Won’t work.

Why is News Corp. obsessed with charging people? Probably because their cost structure is out of line. YouTube, thanks to Google, has its costs under control. Until News Corp. can deliver costs close to that Hulu can’t compete.

So they blame you instead. Yes, you, greedy online consumer who expects something for nothing and chicks for free. It’s all your fault they can’t make money. But they’ll take it from you, force it out of you, make you pay.

Like I said, clueless.

October 25th, 2009

Drupal challenged as White House goes blog

Posted by Dana Blankenhorn @ 5:59 am

Categories: Database Management, Development, General, Government, Internet, content, mass market, politics

Tags: Drupal, White House, Blog, Whitehouse.gov, Blogging, Government, Internet, Dana Blankenhorn

Whitehouse.gov has been relaunched as a Drupal site.

The switch was designed to be transparent, but even a casual observer will note the site now features five separate blogs, and that officials’ names are now listed on announcements that read more like stories, often with personal details.

So it’s one small step for Washington, one giant leap for open source. Sites like Whitehouse.gov are the ultimate honeypots for hackers and script kiddies around the world. This is true regardless of the party in power.

What that means is that government programmers, the Drupal team, and the folks at its commercial arm, Acquia, are going to be very busy with real and imagined bug reports. It’s going to test their systems as well as the software.

Officials indicated that if the Whitehouse site works well Drupal could be in line for other government work.

October 23rd, 2009

Bells give net neutrality the McCain two-step

Posted by Dana Blankenhorn @ 8:52 am

Categories: General, Government, Internet, Legal, politics, telecom

Tags: Net Neutrality, Dana Blankenhorn

For over a century the Bells have been masters of the bureaucratic game.

Their failure in the Bell break-up, which delivered huge profits to investors, only taught them to fight harder. So after putting themselves together like the broom in “The Sorcerer’s Apprentice,” of course they’re going to fight net neutrality like their lives depend on it.

Despite a unanimous FCC vote to start writing net neutrality rules, then, don’t expect an easy victory.

Democrats passed an actual law to rein-in the Bells in 1996, but the Bells finally won that battle, and $200 billion spent to upgrade America’s broadband went instead into Bell pockets. A unanimous FCC looks small by comparison.

Here’s how the two-step works. If the regulators say no you go to Congress. If Congress says no you go to the courts. If the courts say no you go to the states. If the states say no you go to the regulators.(Gee, golly, Officer Krupke.)

Meanwhile you hire every lobbyist you can, create every Astroturf organization you can so it appears your self-interest is the public interest, and contribute heavily to any politician, on any level, who will toe the company line.

Take John McCain (above). He says it’s all “mavericky” to stop net neutrality in Congress. Nothing mavericky going on at all.

McCain was one of five Senators who voted against the 1996 Telecommunications Act, and chairman of the Senate Commerce Committee in 2003-04, when the Bells were consolidating into two companies owning local, long distance, core Internet, and wireless duopolies nationwide. What he called “deregulation” was, and is, monopoly.

As with maverick, deregulation is a brand. It’s just the name of the ranch. The cow’s still going to the slaughterhouse, not Wyoming.

This is actually a bipartisan rant. There are plenty of Democrats, at all levels, bought and paid for by the Bells. Do not listen to what politicians say. Watch what they do and follow the money.

Any form of net neutrality, wireless or wireline, remains an uphill battle.

October 19th, 2009

Microsoft breaks Firefox

Posted by Dana Blankenhorn @ 5:10 am

Categories: Distributions, General, Internet, Microsoft, Network Administration, Not Linux, Security, software appliance

Tags: Mozilla Firefox, Microsoft Corp., Web Browsers, Microsoft Windows, Security, Viruses And Worms, Internet, Operating Systems, Software, Dana Blankenhorn

Mozilla vice president for engineering Mike Shaver is being polite about it, but basically Microsoft pushed some software into Firefox last week that left users vulnerable to attack.

(Wise guys might confuse this Three Stooges bit with a recent Microsoft security meeting.)

Windows Presentation Foundation (which those with a sense of humor now call Windows Thepresentation Foundation or WTF), along with .NET Framework 3.5 (which is now OK), were originally pushed as part of Windows in February, and their problems within Windows were fixed in May.

On Tuesday Microsoft pushed a patch to fix the problem within Internet Explorer. So if you’re patching your Microsoft browser your Firefox is safe. Let me repeat that. Microsoft insists its MS09-054 patch made even Firefox users safe.

But if you’re not following Microsoft directions then WTF you may now be vulnerable to exploit. So Mozilla told Microsoft it would “blocklist” both WTF and the .NET Framework, backing off on the latter after discussions with Microsoft.

The WTF plug-in supports an XML-based user interface called XBAP, and lets its XAML applications run. But the technology was vulnerable to a “drive-by” exploit, in which your hitting a specific Web page would download malware.

I’m reading a lot of blog posts calling this deliberate, even malicious. I don’t think it is. I suspect Microsoft is confusing its convenience with users’ security desires, rationalizing that this power lets it fix security holes automatically.

But its technology makes Microsoft the potential source of great big security holes, which can leave it with egg on its collective face. The kindest thing one can say is that this is vaudeville comedy. Others will call it burlesque or, perhaps, a horror show.

What’s your view?

October 6th, 2009

Netgear offers an open source router that is an applications platform

Posted by Dana Blankenhorn @ 7:09 am

Categories: Applications, Development, Distributions, GPL, General, Hardware, Internet, business models, wireless

Tags: 111Connection refused

Netgear launched a new open source router called the RangeMax Wireless-N, a Linux-based unit with both Gigabit Ethernet ports and ReadyShare USB storage access.

The company is supporting the downloading of firmware and community development around the router at a site called MyOpenRouter.com.

This is precisely what I wanted to see when I started writing my blog posts about “Always On” at Corante in 2003.

The idea is that with storage and processing at the router, applications can live in the air independent of the PC. Clients on such a network might include security systems, RFID chips so you could find your stuff, and medical applications living on your body.

I was allowed to speak about this vision at the 2004 Accelerating Change conference at Stanford, and it is gratifying to see it finally being supported.

Unfortunately, router vendors resisted this concept for a long time. Early Linux routers seemed to emerge by accident, after programmers found they were using open source code without releasing it, and they were not supported by marketing.

Now things are changing. It will be fun to see where it goes from here:

• Security systems that can let police watch your break-in in progress, even from their police cars.
• Home automation systems that know when to water the plants and turn the lights on-and-off while you’re gone.
• Music systems that find you and deliver your tunes to the nearest speakers.
• A way to find your keys, your wallet, and your hat if you’re senile or just have ADHD.
• Systems that monitor the aged so they can age at home, not a nursing home.
• Medical systems that monitor your heart and blood sugar while you sleep, so ER techs are there as you have your heart attack instead of your getting the victory hug from the fellow in the brite nitegown.

All this, and more, can be developed on a platform where routers act as servers, wireless does the work of wires, and clients can be as small as a single RFID chip.

Now get to work and make yourself some money.

October 5th, 2009

What Everyblock owes Knight after its open source success

Posted by Dana Blankenhorn @ 7:36 am

Categories: Distributions, GPL, General, Internet, business models, content, venture capital

Tags: Journalist, Founder, MSNBC, Everyblock, Open Source, Dana Blankenhorn

The Knight Foundation, as part of its efforts to improve online journalism, gave a $1.1 million grant for the launch of Everyblock in 2006.

Everyblock used the money to build a GPL code base that aggregates local information for use by news sites. Here, for instance, is its recent report on my home zip code.

Last month, however, Everyblock was acquired by MSNBC. Terms of the deal were not disclosed but should Knight get its money back, even a little of it?

A better question might be, is there any money to get? In making the announcement the Everyblock blog indicated it was really looking for a way to sustain itself after the Knight money ran out, and MSNBC’s investment will go mainly into making the site more valuable.

And the code is still available, all of it, under the GPL.

Founder Adrian Holovaty is mainly involved these days with another open source project, Django, and his own post on the deal drew a string of attaboys from around the world. There are no reports of him tooling around his home town of Chicago in a fancy car, buying fancy threads, building a fancy home or buying Oprah Winfrey dinner.

It wasn’t that kind of acquisition.

Despite this some journalists who commented at the Nieman Lab blog posting about the deal seemed to have a feeling of seller’s remorse. One asked whether all the code was released. Another asked whether revisions to the code would remain open source.

All this upset Holovaty, who responded within the thread that the charges are not true. All the code was released, he said, and he has given Knight kudos in every interview.

At the Online News Association show in San Francisco, Knight journalism program officer Gary Kebbel said future grant language will change. Again, he was not specific.

Andrew Hazlett noted that when “The Civil War” became a huge hit producer Ken Burns repaid much of his grant money. But Everyblock is not “The Civil War”.

There is an assumption among journalists that when a company is acquired its founders become rich. This often happens. More often, founders just breathe a sigh of relief knowing they have survived the experience and their baby has found a new home.

Some statement from MSNBC about the financial facts would probably end the speculation, my guess being that they only paid enough to sustain the project. And MSNBC’s future generosity to the Knight Foundation might be worth a press release as well, whenever that occurs.

But this jealousy by journalists is unseemly and based on ignorance.

In the world of open source projects move from non-profit to for-profit sponsorship all the time. It is normally considered a good thing. It is not a sign the original sponsors are bad. It means they have a solid structure in place to keep development going.

It’s an illustration of just how far journalists live from the real world that they could get jealous over good news.

October 5th, 2009

How open source defends itself in the PR wars

Posted by Dana Blankenhorn @ 5:50 am

Categories: General, Infrastructure, Internet, LANs and WANs, Network Administration, Security, marketing

Tags: BIND, Nominem, Domain Names, Public Relations, Open Source, Internet, Marketing, Corporate Communications, Dana Blankenhorn

At first, opposing candidates were shocked when Web users used the Web to fisk their latest campaign charges, often turning them back on the attacker inside the same news cycle.

They adapted, and eventually companies like Nominem will, too.

I offered snark in reaction to Nominem’s attack on BIND as “legacy freeware”. But it did not take long for the DNS community to offer more:

• Nominem was subject to DNS cache poisoning attacks open source alternatives were not.
• Nominem’s Web server runs on Apache, which is open source.
• Nominem was founded to develop a version of BIND.

Nominem’s PR people did the best they could under the circumstances, but they were Custer at Little Big Horn, surrounded and under constant fire.

Open source attacks tend to be like zombies in that they demand human sacrifices before they go away. The Skye executive who started this kerfluffle, Jon Shalowitz, (above) might want to avoid any open mics for a while.

Next time Jon and his fellow Stanford Business School alums get together for a chat he’ll have a story for them.

October 1st, 2009

America backs away from the Internet with a whimper

Posted by Dana Blankenhorn @ 5:27 am

Categories: General, Government, Internet, Legal, politics

Tags: Network, ICANN, British Broadcasting Corp., Internet, Government, Vertical Industries, Dana Blankenhorn

It was fun to read government guy Richard Koman’s take on the U.S. government release of ICANN, the Internet governing authority.

That’s because it was completely different from that of the BBC.

Koman wrote that control of the network was being privatized. That sounds like spin meant for Americans.

The BBC wrote it was being de-Americanized.

The New York Times has it as a little of both. “Washington said Wednesday that it would give other governments and the private sector a greater oversight role.”

Which is more important? I’m going with the BBC on this one.

During the Bush years the U.S. government would often assert claims of Internet sovereignty, as when it ran all the network’s traffic through a closet and said it was going after spies. ICANN made no protest then. It might now.

Europeans hailed the move, which will let representatives of many governments — not just the U.S. — oversee ICANN’s work on security, accountability and competition.

When I covered ICANN in the mid-1990s the big issue was democracy, and whether individuals around the world might have a way to participate in network governance. This move means the model is being replaced by a balancing of interests among governments and private business.

It’s not democracy, and it’s not pure capitalism. It’s more like how the European Community itself runs.

I wonder how U.S. Republicans will react to that once they figure it out? Obama let the Internet get Eurocratized. Obama lost the Internet. You betcha. I can see Russia from my house.

September 25th, 2009

Which is more reliable, the client or the cloud

Posted by Dana Blankenhorn @ 6:32 am

Categories: Applications, Cloud Computing, General, Infrastructure, Internet, mass market

Tags: Client, Outage, Manufacturing, Cable, Software As A Service (SaaS), Network Technology, Telecommunications, Personal Technology, Emerging Technologies, Networking

I understand GMail was out again yesterday.

Our Stephen Shankland notes this was the fourth outage of the year.

Education blogger Chris Dawson calls this a game of “unrealistic expectations.” The tweets were all a-Twitter about it, but the big fail whale has been on their screen so much this year that cable news viewers now know what it is.

Online services have brief outages all the time, and it can be funny when it happens. In a store, or at the library, workers stand around helplessly. They have forgotten how to take cash or make change.

But we’re facing a choice, as users, and as a market. We have increasingly bloated clients, and (apparently) unreliable SaaS and cloud networks to serve them.

Which side is going to win?

Having watched technology evolve for nearly 3 decades, I have seen this pattern repeat-and-repeat. We build something, it’s great, so we grow it and it gets bloated. So we go somewhere else and start building that.

It happened with PCs, with LANs, with the Internet, with mobile, and even with open source. Even Linux is now bloated.

So what’s the answer? This does not happen with hardware. Hardware is highly reliable, increasingly so, as it becomes more complex. Anything relying on software, however, is increasingly prone to breakage as it grows.

Knowing this, will you rely on the client or on the cloud?

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