Vanity Fair has written an awesome article detailing an oral history of the internet. It’s an amazing read with some great interviews. Read How the Web was Won.
Archive
Yet another case of big brother spying on your web traffic surfaced recently. Wired reported that British Telecom, an internet service provider, secretly partnered with Phorm to inject JavaScript into all pages served to 18,000 of their customers. The JS code was used to track users’ movements on the web and serve up ads accordingly. Some users believed their computers had been infected with adware when the JS code Phorm injected caused their browsers to crash.
The desire to better target ads to consumer use has been a long sought goal for many companies. Both AOL and Yahoo have purchased or constructed similar ad tracking software recently in order to better target ads to users. AOL calls their software Platform A. Yahoo calls their software Amp. Additionally, Google surfaces targeted ads in their search results based on the search terms, known as Google Ad sense / Ad words.
Internet users who ever believed their surfing was anonymous are naive. Any web developer knows that every connection to a server passes, at the bare minimum, an IP address. But has British Telecom gone too far? Unlike Google, Yahoo and AOL who can only track your movement on their sites, BT tracked all traffic regardless of destination.
As the web becomes even more social, the sense of anonymity once present in early days of the web is quickly fading. Google popularized email addresses that are your real name. Long gone are the days of obscured screennames once so common to Hotmail and AOL. This movement came with the loss of some privacy, but users could feel secure knowing that surfing from one random website to another didn’t mean seeing ads from the last style site you visited. If a user had just spent an two hours looking up travel destinations, they could rest assured that they wouldn’t see travel ads when surfing to a music site. But, as companies seek to improve ad revenues, they will all desire to garner higher click thru rates and higher profits to pay for the vast server farms needed to sustain their companies.
You can find the original leaked report on Wiki Leaks here.
While reading an interesting post, I can across a link to the Fail Blog. It’s totally hilarious! Thanks for existing fail blog.
Canadian Byron Ng has found the security hole in the link between Yahoo and MySpace. Ng managed to grab Paris Hilton’s private photos off her MySpace page due to a weakness in their security model. Check out his instructions here. The blog ValleyWag detailed the exploit and posted a few of Hilton’s private images in this post. The security hole is fairly interesting. It’s not clear how long it will take Yahoo and MySpace to plug it. But it does bring up larger questions of how secure any data portability will be moving forward.
Safari is getting a new JavaScript engine, thank god! Having suffered through some of the quirks of Safari, I am happy they are moving on. Maybe the new Squirrelfish engine will be more inline with Firefox or the dreaded Internet Explorer and eliminate some of the Safari specific workarounds (read: hacks) that have been added into so much of the front end code.
If we are all really, really lucky, maybe Safari/Webkit will get a new CSS engine too. Oh, happy days.
Yesterday Techmeme featured an article on metered internet usage. The headline definitely caught my attention and I was immediately concerned about the future of the web. The majority of websites rely on advertisements to pay their bills. If a metered internet exists, similar to the days of dial-up, won’t the web suffer? Behemoth sites such as Yahoo, Google and AOL depend on page views to judge the growth and strength of their products. If people suddenly have to be concerned about exceeding their monthly bandwidth, they may start being more judicious with their clicks.
I consider myself a ‘power user’ I am on the ‘net between 8 and 15 hours a day. While the majority of consumption takes place at work, I also have access to the web on my phone and in my apartment. And although I don’t download amazingly large files, I have been considering moving towards ‘net powered video consumption devices such as Apple TV and the recently announced Netflix player. High quality videos from services such as iTunes of Netflix could quickly put even the most average user past their monthly cap.
Cable companies argue that they need the limits to reign in heavy users and pay for much needed infrastructure costs. While I do advocate for infrastructure improvements, I don’t believe for a minute that Time Warner and others don’t have the cash. In 2005, Time Warner Cable accounted for 43% of the profits Time Warner earned. The growth and strength of the cable company led Time Warner to file an IPO. According to the International Herald Tribune, Time Warner Cable sought to raise $7 Billion, not exactly pocket change. And although the cable company received none of the cash raised by their IPO, they did become an independent company, and they continue to thrive and expand. In fact, in the beginning of May Time Warner announced it planned to completely spin off Time Warner Cable, though exact terms of the deal are still unknown.
In the metered internet article, author Peter Svensson, cited metered internet usage is common overseas, but failed to say where or source this claim. While this may be true, America is the country that uses the largest portion of the web and provides many of the most popular internet destinations. Including, YouTube, Google, Facebook and more. Internet innovation thrives in the U.S. for many reasons and unlimited usage only aids this growth.
As blogger Jeff Jarvis stated on BuzzMachine in January of this year, the internet exploded when flat rate internet usage was introduced. Is Time Warner trying to reverse the trend that thankfully ended over a decade ago? We can only hope Time Warner’s test in Beaumont, Texas turns out to be a total failure, and the concept of a metered internet is laid to rest for another 10 years or more.
My heart just skipped ten beats.
It all started when I attempted to backup my contacts from the iPhone onto my work computer. I didn’t check the box that reads “put new contacts created on this iPhone into the group:”. As a consequence, all my phone contacts got mixed in with business contacts, which turned into a real mess. So I deleted all my phone contacts from the address book and mistakenly hit sync. Big mistake. In a matter of seconds my phone was free of all contacts!
I managed to undue the delete in address book and get my phone contacts organized into a group. However, now whenever I hit the sync button I kept getting an error message from iTunes that the iPhone has disconnected and the sync hadn’t been successful. Oh crap! Was I really going to have to hand enter hundreds of phone numbers, emails and addresses - again?
I googled for a little while but wasn’t able to find a solution. Until I stumbled across a mac forums post from several months ago. One of the users suggested doing the following:
This worked for me: Go to Applications > iSync > Preferences > Reset Sync History
I followed these steps and was back in business. I have posted this here to save others the same headache. Thanks ryanjbonnell.
I am proud to announce another launch for foto eBook. Mike Berube recently joined the growing list of photographers to utilize foto eBook. In addition to Mike’s new site, you can also check out Kenneth Dickerman and Myles Little, both of whom are powering their sites with foto eBook.
I recently had the need to install FfMpeg for a project I am working on. After Googling for some time I learned a little bit about the ffmpeg project. The most interesting thing I learned was their are no formal releases of the project. So I just downloaded it from SVN using the following command:
svn export svn://svn.mplayerhq.hu/ffmpeg/trunk ffmpeg
Then I just ran
./configure
In the directory I downloaded ffmpeg too, and finally
make && make install
That’s it, it was up and running in a few minutes. I have added this here because so many of the blogs with information regarding Ffmpeg and CentOS 5 were out of date or wrong. It also helps that my version of CentOS already had gcc and gcc-c++ installed, both of which are needed to compile these from their sources.
Update:
I have written a tutorial for a much more robust install of ffmpeg. Read: A Robust ffmpeg Install for CentOS 5.
http://myleslittlephotography.com/
I just finished installing the foto eBook software for Myles Little. This is the second domain running on the foto eBook beta version. Kenneth Dickerman’s site is also powered by the beta version of the software. The back end foto eBook application uses PHP, MySQL and JavaScript to allow photographers to manage their Flash galleries online from anywhere they have an internet connection. The front end uses Flash, Apache mod rewrite and a CGI script to allow deeplinking into the flash movie. For instance, if Kenneth wants to send users directly to his Portraits Gallery, he can. I wrote a little about that technology in this post.
There is also still an alpha version of the software, which Sarah Sudhoff uses. Sarah’s site has a custom Flash intro, which isn’t supported in the beta version, but will be in foto eBook 1.0.
