Weekend Wrap Up–Bad Moves Edition

It has been a busy week, at least if your job is spinning jaw-dropping stupid stunts.

Bad Move Number One.  I think that people have a right to talk about “conflict of interest” in an honest way when you approve one of the largest mergers in US history, then four months later go to work for the company you approved the merger for.  Meredith Attwell Baker, one of the two Republican Commissioners at the Federal Communications Commission decided to take a lobbying position at Comcast. But, as we all know, one did not have anything to do with the other. 

Bad Move Number Two.  You know it’s a bad move to plant smears on your corporate opponent when the PR company you hired to do so suddenly says “Wait a minute, this isn’t right”.  But Facebook went ahead and did it anyway.  Really, Zuck?  Do you really feel that people are going to leave Facebook for whatever the flavor of the month Google is pitching to be relevant in the social market? 

Bad Move Number Three.  Rupert Murdoch decided to create his own version of Wikileaks, called “Safehouse”.  Yeah, I know, it took me a while to stop laughing on this one.  Of course, unlike Wikileaks, if the heat gets to be too much (you know like someone asks “who sent you this?”), they will sell you down the river to the authorities.  Really, the man is known for spreading lies concerning just about everyone on the planet and we are supposed to believe that if it is posted in “Safehouse” then it must be true?  They say that two positives don’t make a negative.  Yeah.  Right.

Bad move Number Four.  Something that really has something to do with technology, although it doesn’t look like it on the surface.  The political season is once again upon us and unfortunately, we are going to have to put up with political ads.  So far, we have a tie for what are the worst political ads ever, and we have only just begun, so the only place you’ll see them is either on “Web Soup” or the internet.  Really, Newt Gingrich has no reason to be turning out this cheese.  He has been in the game too long to think that this pile of excrement is actually good for him.  But Dan Adler’s ads are starting off by being, well, different.  And by Different, I mean just WTF?  I mean, Patty Duke, in the Muscle Beach weight lifting area telling constituents “Dan Adler gets sh*t done.” and a second ad that makes as much sense as the first.  I don’t know whether the guy is serious or is trolling the southern half of California. BTW, his campaign manager is Sean Astin, he of LOTR fame and Patty Duke’s son.  So there is no excuse for these either.

Just remember, folks, technology is a tool.  Unfortunately, so are many people. 

A Perfect Storm?

The outage at Amazon over the last two days now has been more than disconcerting. Many businesses have been sorely affected, and unfortunately at the time of this writing still are.  The social news site, Reddit has now been under “emergency read only” mode for over twenty four hours. Quora was hit hard yesterday, but seems to be slowly coming back.  All Things Digital has a list of companies that were hit, and opened up comments so that readers could add others they missed.  The list is impressive.

But unfortunately, the big question is still unanswered.  What is going on?  Amazon has been tweeting and posting as to the fixes and status, but no one has answered the basic question.  In fact, reading the messages coming from Amazon, it felt as if the public is hearing “Don’t Panic”, while all hell is breaking loose behind the closed door. As people have pointed out, it sounds more like damage control rather than a full blown explanation to their customers as to the real problem.  And for companies who are using AWS, a lack of a real explanation to what was going severely hampered their own disaster recovery efforts.  Roman Stanek, CEO of GoodData blogged:

My ops people were ready at 1:00 am PT to start our own disaster recovery, but status updates completely failed to indicate the severity of the situation. We relied on AWS to fix the problem. Had we had more information, we would have made a different choice.

The guest commentary in Geek Wire by Keith Smith, CEO of BigDoor, a Seattle startup that builds game mechanics into online publisher’s Web sites was precise about this.  BigDoor relies on Amazon Web Services for their business.  And Keith’s comments echoes the thoughts of every manager of every company hit by this outage.

There are a lot of really obvious and relatively easy things that any startup can do to avoid an all-out reliance on any single cloud provider, but those things take additional time and money – two of the most important things that every startup is constrained by.

We absolutely love AWS because of the pace of innovation and scale that it has allowed us to accomplish. But after today’s episode is over, we will have a big decision to make.

We can spend cycles designing and building technical belts and suspenders that will help us avoid a massive failure like this in the future, or we can continue to rely on a single huge partner and also continue our break-neck pace of iteration and product development.

I can’t tell you today which option we will choose. But I’m sure it will be the question on the mind of many startups across the country.

Amazon’s lack of transparency is remindful BP’s mishandling of the Gulf oil spill.  One reason why people were angered then was because officials within the company were not forthcoming about what was going on.  Companies using IaaS rely on technical communications written by technicians, not lawyers.  The idea of the internet is about transparency.  This is what happens when it isn’t. 

Why Apple Is Your Psycho Ex

Ah yes, the Ex who had to know everywhere you were going.  Some of us have had the displeasure of dealing with someone who feels as if they have to track our every move.  But I bet you didn’t think that it was Apple .  You see, in the Guardian today there was a really great story about how Apple keeps tabs on where you are and when you were there in a secret file on your iPhone (and iPad) that hooks up with a file on your computer when you sync your files.   

How bad is this? Let us start with what is tracked by going to radar.oreilly.com where they first broke the news: 

All iPhones appear to log your location to a file called "consolidated.db." This contains latitude-longitude coordinates along with a timestamp. The coordinates aren’t always exact, but they are pretty detailed. There can be tens of thousands of data points in this file, and it appears the collection started with iOS 4, so there’s typically around a year’s worth of information at this point. Our best guess is that the location is determined by cell-tower triangulation, and the timing of the recording is erratic, with a widely varying frequency of updates that may be triggered by traveling between cells or activity on the phone itself.

Up to a year’s worth of unencrypted information.  Yes, unencrypted.  Which means that basically anyone could get in and see.  That is not good from a privacy standpoint.  Now, the cell phone companies all ready have this information available to people in the law enforcement sector, but in order to get it, they need a court order to do so.  If the information is on your phone, well, what’s to stop a techno-savvy officer from “accidently” seeing what should not be seen? 

Of course, the first rabid argument is that Google tried it first.  Oh, yes, the great Googly-Moogly tried the “Latitude” system, which allowed people to enable their mobile to give out details of their location to trusted contacts and ran afoul of privacy mavens for that as well.  But here’s the slight but most important difference: Google allowed you to opt into the service.  If you wanted to let the world know where you were in your private reality show, you could.  With Apple, there is no choice.  You are being tracked, whether you like it or not.  And so far, Apple ain’t talkin’.  No word as to why this was created or if this can be disabled.  So there are various theories as to the whys and wherefores, which comes back down to marketing and advertising. 

But in case you want to get mad about this, you may well be out of luck, as you forgot that ever present 15,200-word terms and conditions agreement for Apple’s iTunes program, used to synchronize with iPhones, iPods and iPads.  In it  is an 86-word paragraph about "location-based services".

“Apple and our partners and licensees may collect, use, and share precise location data, including the real-time geographic location of your Apple computer or device. This location data is collected anonymously in a form that does not personally identify you and is used by Apple and our partners and licensees to provide and improve location-based products and services. For example, we may share geographic location with application providers when you opt in to their location services.”

In other words, you might want to consider alternatives in handsets if you want to keep your life private. 

Epsilon Data Fail

Last week I received a message from my usual grocery store. I have an affiliation card with them, you know one that allows you a few cents off products in return for them getting information from you concerning your buying habits. The message was letting me know that it was possible that my email address had been taken from them. An e-mail hack, I thought.  Great.  Something else to watch out for.  At least that was all it was, I thought.  Then came the same message from another affiliation card.  Then another card.  Then the bank that I have a credit card with.  Then the phone company.

That is when I started to be very concerned, which is a nice way of saying I was on the phone asking questions and trying to keep from yelling at the harried but polite voices on the other end of the line.  Apparently, I was not the only one. You see, I am part of what appears to be the largest breach of data in US history.  And now I am going to be watching my e-mail very carefully over the next few months, because I am now at a high risk for phishing and other scams.

OK, here are the particulars.  When a company gets your e-mail address as part of an affiliation card or customer account, they do not just sit on it.  They use it to contact you concerning any offers they have pending or any type of general information.  But they do not do this in-house.  They use an outside company to do that, like a company called Epsilon.  So if someone should hack into a company like Epsilon, they are able to get information about a lot of customers over a range of companies, not just about people who shop at Kroger, for instance. 

That is exactly what happened.  Epsilon, which provides marketing services via email to about 2,500 companies, put a warning on its website on Friday stating that its systems had been “exposed by an unauthorized entry” into its email system.  It is not yet known who perpetrated the attack, which US law enforcement agencies have begun investigating.

“The information that was obtained was limited to email addresses and/or customer names only,” Epsilon said in its statement. “A rigorous assessment determined that no other personal identifiable information associated with those names was at risk. A full investigation is currently underway.” Other information, such as passwords or credit card details, are not thought to have been exposed, but never the less, this is a huge hack. 

How many people are affected?  Given the number and names of the companies that use Epsilon (Kroger, Marriott Rewards, US Bank, JPMorgan Chase, Capital One, Citi, Walgreens for starters), it could be millions.  And out of those millions, it only takes a handful of people to fall for a phising expedition to make money for criminals. 

What to do in the interim?  Double check your emails and do not just click onto a link, especially if it is a company that is a part of this breach.  You may also want to change your current account e-mails to another address for these companies.  A pain in the neck, certainly, but it beats dealing with the aftermath of being scammed.

Somewhere Over the Google Rainbow

Google has finally announced the winner of its1GB fiber-to-the-home network extravaganza.  The winner is Kansas City, Kansas.

Google announced in February, 2010 that it would build and operate its own fiber test network.  Over 1,000 US town applied.  There were all kinds of ways to get Google’s attention.  Google plans to start building the Kansas City network later this year, offering service to residents in the first quarter of 2012. Pricing is said to be “competitive”.

So how did Kansas City do it?  First, KC had a lot going for it in the competition.  But, if you read the story in the Kansas City Star, it speaks of “staying below the radar and keeping the team very tight”.  It talks of confidentiality agreements.  It meant being secretive and not letting anyone know about it until the very end.  Because Google wanted it that way.

Excuse my progressive side here for a moment, but basically, the government of Kansas City was as transparent about this as a brick wall.  This is one of those deals that could be seen as having been done in a back room without any input from the people.  Oh, wait, that is exactly what happened.  The fact that not even executive assistants were clued in as to what was going on should give people pause.  This is government.  These are officials elected by the people to do the people’s business.  Shouldn’t the people get to know what is going on before the announcement?  The fact that this is a great win for a great city notwithstanding, the point is that if the deal turns out to be a proverbial pig in a poke somewhere down the line, what do you do?  You were not invited to the deal making.

But we all know that Google does no evil and therefore, this should be seen as a golden ticket to the chocolate factory.  But it is not.  It is a deal between a corporation and city and county government.  There were more than enough cities out there willing to be up front and honest about what they were doing.  They didn’t win.

Apparently being open about doing business is being evil these days.

The More You Know (And Shooting Star)

Take a few days away and all the things that happen…

First, in the land of law, Ars Technica reports that a former lobbyist for the RIAA has become a federal judge, ruling on, of all things, three mass file-sharing lawsuits.  But we should expect nothing but a clear-cut ruling, based entirely on the law.  Because conflict of interests happens to other people.

However, if you feel the need to press the panic button, you can.  According to Reuters, some day soon, when pro-democracy campaigners have their cellphones confiscated by police, they’ll be able to hit the “panic button” — a special app that will both wipe out the phone’s address book and emit emergency alerts to other activists. 

In hacking news, mySQL was hacked over the weekend via a blind SQL injection. Hackers extracted usernames and password hashes from the site, which were subsequently posted to pastebin.com. Any easy to guess login credentials could be easily extracted from this data using rainbow tables to match dictionary passwords to their hash values.  This only points out that if it’s made by a person, a person can crack it.  Just remember that the next time someone tell you smugly that something cannot be hacked. 

Finally, we lost a true visionary over the weekend.  Paul Baran passed away at the age of  84.  Baran conceived the Internet’s architecture at the height of the Cold War. Forty years later, he says the Net’s biggest threat wasn’t the USSR – it was the phone company.  So right then, so right now.

Party Like It’s 1999

A couple of weeks ago I wrote about the reaction of the movers and shakers in the tech industry to the suggestion that we were in a tech bubble.  Today, I officially move into the “Holy crap, didn’t they learn the last time?” camp.  I am not alone.  Welcome to Bubble-land, population us.

The reason for my defection?  The social photo-sharing app Color.  The company just nabbed 41 million dollars in funding, led by the funding giant, Sequoia. Now before I go any further, I will say I have no problems with the app.  This is merely a symptom of something much, much larger.  But basically this is a mobile photo-sharing application, not unlike Path, Instagram, or PicPlz.  There is a difference however; all social connections in the application are dynamic and established on-the-fly depending on whom you’re hanging out with. And your photos are shared with everyone in the vicinity.

Compelling technology, but is it worth 41 million from the get-go? According to Sequoia, “Not Since Google Have We Seen This”.  That vaguely sounds like what people were saying about selling pet food on-line.  It was certainly a headline that could draw some satirical pokes about the initial slide presentation for investors.  That is what scares me. Granted, the pedigree of the management is impeccable: Bill Nguyen, the man who built LaLa, Peter Pham, founder of BillShrink, as well as former LinkedIn Chief Scientist DJ Patil.

But even the most pedigreed of teams sometimes step in it.  Remember when Steven Spielberg, Robin Williams and Dustin Hoffman decided to remake Peter Pan?  Different area of expertise, same thought.  As Mike Maples pointed out about the upcoming bubble, this is yet again an instance of everyone crowding around the soccer ball.  While Color has a great stable of people and an application that has marked differences from everyone else in the field, the question remains: is it really that different? 

That is the question of the day.  Here’s hoping that satirical Powerpoint slide of “making wheelbarrows of money” holds true.  If not, expect that line to signify the stupidity run rampant in Bubble 2.0. 

The More You Know (And Shooting Star)

Quite a bit has happened this week. The world is fixated on the growing Japanese nuclear problem, but one thing I keep wondering about is that since Japan is the acknowledged leader in robotic technology, why haven’t we been seeing more robotic technology not only in the nuclear problem but also search and rescue from the earthquake and tsunami?  I’m sure the technology is being used in some way, but there is nothing newsworthy.  Odd.

Speaking of the earthquake, Only 6 hours later and we had a full blown article with citations about the earthquake and tsunami including facts about the quake as well as international responses.  That is what the internet is really all about.  Also, the tsunami warning system took only 12 minutes after the 8.9 magnitude quake hit Sendai on Friday for the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration to alert emergency workers in California, Oregon, Washington and Alaska that a potentially catastrophic tsunami was heading their way. Considering the waves were moving at approximately 500 miles per hour, that is money and lives saved. BTW, some want to gut the funding for this, because saving lives obviously it isn’t that important.

Senator Al Franken was at SXSW in Austin to tell everyone there the obvious:  If Net Neutrality rules were deleted, then the terrorists corporations have won.  Franken, who has his own problems with the FCC’s regulations, accused conservatives of hijacking the Internet debate. “They’ll tell you that putting rules in place to preserve Net neutrality as it exists today amounts to a government takeover of the Internet, a talking point deserves a place alongside death panels and Obama’s a Muslim.”  Not long after that AT&T announced they were going to cap download limits.  Journalists still have yet to see the connection.

Speaking of journalist not doing their jobs, Anonymous released the long awaited bank of America documents.  Since all the TV journalists were standing amongst the rubble in Sendai to show that they were “on top of the news”, this was easily forgotten. Granted, the back door dealings that brought the world economy to its knees isn’t as sexy a shot as standing next to a tanker dry docked by nature a mile from the beach but shouldn’t someone be talking about it?

Finally in some good news, Microsoft and the government felled the giant spam farm Rustock, lessening spam worldwide by about 40 percent.  A lawsuit by Microsoft that was unsealed at the company’s request late today triggered several coordinated raids last Wednesday that took down Rustock, a botnet that infected millions of computers with malicious code in order to turn them into a massive spam-sending network. So you can thank Microsoft for less spam about fake watches and fake viagra in your mailbox today.  Makes up for the fact that this week they killed off the Zune player.

Reach Out And Cap Someone

Oh, AT&T.  The company that gave us Ernestine Tomlin’s famous line “We don’t care, we don’t have to.  We’re the Phone Company” is at it again.  If you stream over Netflix, expect to be pissed off, because this really applies to you.  If this goes forward without a huge fight from consumers, expect every other telecommunication an cable company out there to follow suit. 

According to DSL Reports, AT&T will be sending out notices this week informing their customers that starting in May, the company will be implementing a new 150GB monthly usage cap for all DSL customers and a new 250 GB cap on all U-Verse users.  This is how it will work: only users who exceed the new usage cap three times — across the life of your account, not per month — will be forced to pay these new per byte overages. Overages will be $10 for every 50GB over the 150 GB or 250GB limit they travel. 

The company says the caps will only affect about 2 percent of their DSL customers, asserting that the average customer uses about 18 GB each month . A statement AT&T provided to GigaOm also noted that “importantly, we are not reducing the speeds, terminating service or limiting available data like some others in the industry.”

No, nothing like that.  By the way, the average High-definition movie is around 3GB.  So if you watch one HD movie per evening, you’re taking up over half of your allotment per month.  If you have a family, that could start to add up.  Quickly.

Keep in mind that AT&T is an investor in bandwidth-intensive services like OnLive’s HD game streaming platform. And of course included in that bandwidth cap are all those advertisements that people slog through in order to get what they need over the net.  But the predominant question that DSL Reports asks is the one we know the answer to:

…does AT&T scale these caps and overages to accommodate for the dropping cost of bandwidth and hardware moving forward, or will they bend to inevitable investor pressure and continually tighten the metered billing noose?

If you don’t know, ask Ernestine Tomlin.  She’ll be more than happy to answer your question.

Charlie and the Twitter Factory

In case you didn’t know, Charlie Sheen joined Twitter a couple of days ago, and had over a million followers within 24 hours, the fastest so far.  He’s right up there with Conan and Kanye West for going zero to one million in twenty four hours.  Pretty heady stuff.

But the real story is that Charlie, unlike you, me and grandma, could be making money off his tweet stream. Not a million per tweet, but money that the rest of us would see as a pretty comfy side gig.  You see, Charlie Sheen is a member of the Ad.ly network, According to their own description,

“Ad.ly runs celebrity endorsements in social media. We help brands connect with consumers via the most influential celebrities, athletes and artists on Facebook, Twitter and more.

Ad.ly is pioneering the celebrity endorsement market in digital media, tapping the $50 billion global spend on endorsements as well as the $35 billion global spend in digital advertising.

In just 15 months, we have run 20,000 endorsements for 150 top brands.”

While Sheen hasn’t started hawking mirrors and razor blades via Ad.ly yet, if he did, he could pick up between $1000-$20000 per endorsement.  More celebrity endorsements are in tweet streams, currently making up about 30 percent of current ads.  Nice work if you can get it.  In the mean time, Sheen has been tweeting out images of brands, giving free advertising to Pepsi’s Naked Juice and Direct TV. I’m not sure if either company really wants Sheen to be endorsing their products, but these days, even bad publicity is good publicity.

So what does a guy do in this case?  When his tweets are of this variety…

“Just got asked to do the Nancy Grace show… I’d rather go on a long trip with Chuck Lorre in a ‘75 Pacer…”

All I can say is, “Bring it”.