boingboing.net's excellent tribute

No, it’s not the iPad, the iPhone, or even the iPod. It’s definitely the Mac. Steve Jobs real gift to the world was bringing the Mac to the market in 1984. The Macintosh was a major step in making personal computers pleasant and easy enough to use to gain mass market appeal. If the Mac hadn’t been released then, the industry, our industry, would not be where it is today. You likely would not be reading this, you would not be on Facebook or Twitter, you wouldn’t know many of the people you know, especially those met online.

The Mac was never the market leader, but it’s existence opened peoples eyes. Computers HAD to be easy to use like the Macintosh, cryptic commands typed into dark screens weren’t going to cut it. This changed the game, the competition released competing products and the personal computer industry as we know it was born.

That’s was what Steve did. He didn’t invent anything brilliant. He took fantastic people and technologies and integrated them into products that created market sectors that didn’t exist. He took huge gambles, that industry experts almost always said would not pay off. Sometimes they didn’t. But others really did change the world. I know it’s trendy to hate Jobs, Apple, heck, anything popular with hipsters. Just don’t forget the value of what Jobs accomplished with his much too short life. Certainly the world would look very different today if the modern computer as we know it was still sitting in the halls of Xerox and the labs of Universities for another 5 or 10 years as everyone continued to type cryptic commands into their terminals…

Rest in peace Steve, you changed my life, and for that I will be eternally grateful.

First the good. The UI changes are great. I have always been a fan of tiny widgets and maximizing screen real-estate. In 10.6 and prior, I went to great lengths to shrink every font and widget. In 10.7 theres no need. Scroll bars are tiny and automatically fade out, you can full screen most apps, fonts and widgets are just smaller. Fantastic. New UI animations and transitions are everywhere and delay things a bit, hopefully there will be a TinkerTool or similar to disable them. They’re short and tolerable but as an example, I am typing a character or two into the ether when switching spaces during the animation.  I’m not really into the LaunchPad paradigm, but the MasterControl look works for me. Mail.app’s new UI is fantastic, iCal’s is a bit over the top. Mail.app’s performance (specifically around large operations and anything RSS related) is a complete train wreck. I expect a patch soon. Reverse scrolling took less than a day to adjust to (I am an iPad/iPhone user though). Autocorrect is a nice addition. The new Finder is great, Safari updates seem good, heck even the Terminal.app updates are nice! Grab an updated version of TerminalCopyOnSelect and away you go.

10.7 is a huge update, in the way 10.5 was to 10.4, and at $29. If Mail.app’s performance is fixed I’ll likely be very happy.

Here’s a very WTF bug though. I ran into it last night and figured it was just me, or I’d boned something up. I have a bunch of shell scripts that do SSH port forwards for accessing network appliances and infrastructure behind lock and key. Half of them stopped working on me, failing to resolve their respective hosts. How strange. Amusingly Brandon was complaining of basically the same problem this morning so we decided to take a look.

Some how OS X’s resolver library is no longer checking any hostname with a dot in it against the /etc/resolv.conf search directive in 10.7. Seriously. Let’s say I have a server called admin.omghi2u.com. My /etc/resolv.conf (and OS X network control panel) contain omghi2u.com in the search field. Surely, we can resolve (ping, ssh, web browse, whatever) to ‘admin’ since it can match that as admin.omghi2u.com. Cool. Now normally, in UNIX (heck even Windows land!) if I had admin.tor.omghi2u.com and admin.chi.omghi2u.com, simply hitting ‘admin.tor’ or ‘admin.chi’ would match the omghi2u.com hostnames. Not the case in 10.7. Something is clearly broken in the resolver in libSystem. Oddly despite being linked to the same library, the host command still functions properly… Maybe the search logic is handled by the command itself…

While it’s a simple bug fix, its an annoying oversight on Apples part. Breaking basic UNIX networking functionality is kinda shameful.

UPDATE (JULY 26th): Head over to Brandon’s site for a fix!

Despite what many of the people commenting on the Ars article think though, it’s not a case of ICE being sloppy or behind the “HTTP/1.1 times”. They seize upwards of 100 domains at a time, it’s far easier to just force a TLD to point a target domain at their nameservers and move on. Basically, ICE has configured their bind install to respond with 74.81.170.110 for *any* query. So anything pointed to ns1/ns2.seizedservers.com will respond with the takedown message automatically. No messing with any configuration, apache, bind or otherwise on their end, efficient! That’s pretty clever, whether or not you agree with what they accomplish.

Of course it does allow for some good pranks. Point your domains at 74.81.170.110, tell your friends you’re in legal trouble, good times ensue. For more fun, change someone’s local resolvers to ICE’s name servers, see how long it takes them to realize they haven’t actually taken down the entire internet.

Who knows, maybe parking everything there will stop all the electronic and postal spam sent to my multitude of vanity domains…

Twitter really sucks. The Lotus Evora S on the other hand, looks awesome.

UPDATE: Even worse. Twitter enforces the SLIGHTLY LONGER length of the t.co URL, causing me to actually LOSE 2 chars from my own shortener. Ridiculous…

Let’s say I buy a full non-burstable gigabit link from one of the cheaper telcos like Cogent or Level 3. Depending on your market, you will end up paying $4-8/megabit for it. Thats not including termination, port fees, the hardware required to route it, cost of transport (i.e. your fiber conduit rental) , etc and those things can certainly add up to 5-20% of the total cost, but for the sake of simplification we’ll ignore them. 1 gigabit, when run to the horrible limit (resulting in very unhappy customers) is 328, 718 gigabytes/month of actual data moved, and frankly is a lot of traffic in any sense. (Lets leave peering out of this discussion, the larger an ISP the more of their footprint they can get through peering, but it really doesn’t help the independents and even mid-sized guys without international fiber to meet in lots of POPs and IXs)

Now presume I don’t want to oversell it what so ever. I want to sell enterprise grade DSL to businesses who demand a reasonable 10mbps guaranteed. This is a very common scenario. If I split my gigabit link up to 10megabit customers, the most I can fit on it and guarantee their performance is 100 customers. If we take our cost to buy just the transit, ignoring any of the related costs, we’re going to run $40-80/customer. Tack on termination of the DSL/cable (hardware, very expensive), lines to the customer (very very expensive) and of course support, you are looking at easily 2x that cost. While a business will have no trouble stomaching this cost+ profit for us, a consumer obviously will not.

This is where over-selling comes in. If I assume that my 10 megabit users will use roughly 50 gigabytes per month of data, that means I can fit in 6400 subscribers onto that link. (Nobody would run their links at 100%, this would add at least 20-30% to the total cost of bandwidth to buy overhead, but we’ll ignore it for simplification sake) 6400 subscribers, each now are only using a dollar or so of our transit, and with support, hardware and line costs fixed, we can sell the service for $40, cover our costs and make profit. Yes profit. People seem to forget, a company needs to make profit or its share holders will terminate them. Profit is not evil or crooked.

This all worked great in the early 2000s. Bandwidth was cheap, space and power to build telecom sites was cheap, and fiber transport was nearly free. Bandwidth is still cheap, but everything else has gone up an arm and a leg. None of that really matters though, because the real problem is that we don’t use the internet like we did 10 years ago. Who can stand to watch Youtube or Netflix at less than 720p? How many households have a kid (adult) running BitTorrent all the time? And really, who wants a sub-25 megabit link nowadays?

Providers cannot oversell at the levels they did even 5 years ago. While we may say boo hoo why do I care what XYZ evil company makes (not fair, remember these are people working like anyone else), remember we also want startup and new ISPs to compete. They have it even rougher as their cost/subscriber is higher.

Basically it comes down to this. The cost to provide internet, in North America, has not gotten massively cheaper, but per capita we are using much much more. In order for providers to maintain their levels of overselling they are imposing quotas and throttling p2p. People hate quotas and DPI, but trust me, people hate rate increases more. Yes it would be totally cool if we all had gigabit fiber to the doorstep, but sadly this is a huge undertaking, and companies like Rogers or Bell is going to invest in it, wide spread, only to have the government force them to let other providers use the links/equipment at cost. It’s not in the private sector’s best interest to do this. (typo fixed ;) thanks everyone!)

So yea, we have out dated infrastructure since we put it in much earlier than say Asia and Europe. I think, the real solution is for the government to step in and use tax dollars to improve it (OMG, I can’t believe I said that) if we really want deregulated residential internet. Run fiber to the homes, maintain it, charge providers at-cost to use it, and yea we’ll have great competitive internet again.

Yes I advocated for publicly funded internets, I must need coffee.

“Registrar’s access agreement shall require the third party to agree not to use the data to allow, enable, or otherwise support any marketing activities, regardless of the medium used. Such media include but are not limited to e-mail, telephone, facsimile, postal mail, SMS, and wireless alerts.”

In fact this has been on the books since 2003. Yet on a daily basis I receive whois-crawled spam. Now yes, you can definitely whois any domain and readily spam the owner. But these people are not just spamming one or two domains, they’re spamming thousands, if not tens of thousands at a time. (As with all spam, you’ve got to fish a lot to catch anything). Access to this requires what ICANN calls ‘bulk whois’, which pretty much any registrar with an API will provide you. However it is up to them to prevent people from using this as a means to spam people. While I realize it is not trivial to track the spam back to the registrar allowing the mass harvest, it’s not like there is an infinite number of registrars. Tracking down the people providing this information to spammers would not be impossible. Considering ICANN is pretty much useless for everything else (it took them how long to stop turning a blind eye to domain tasting? oh right, 10 years), they could at least enforce this policy, track down offending registrars and remove their accreditation. (I kid, ICANN will never do this, their rules are pretty much toothless, and this article is really just to ridicule spammers who take themselves seriously)

Now, whois-crawled spam is a bit different than your usual spam. No viagra, OEM software or luxury watches. No, whois spammers usual take themselves a lot more seriously, which makes it all the funnier because they’re just as pathetic as the guy selling Chinese V1ag4ra. Let’s look at a few of  the types of assholes who take part in this practice. (and some of my favourite examples)

Web hosts offering quality web hosting at low low prices:

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The idea behind this type of domain spammer is pretty simple. You own a domain name, everyone who owns a domain name has some sort of hosting for it, everyone likes cheaper hosting. Amusingly sales@ and abuse@ evul.net get *tons* of it, which is usually very poorly targeted (and ironic when it goes to abuse@). However, the spam pictured above was actually well targeted, because its offering local large scale hosting, the kind that evul.net might want. However there in lies the problem, why as a web site owner (or a web host like evul.net) would you ever want hosting from a *spammer*. It immediately calls into question the ethics, let alone the quality of such a provider. They all end up getting spamcop’d and in the case of this one, I wrote to the idiots to personally express my disgust, they are locally known and slimy. Hopefully enough spamcop reports will get these wannabe providers upstreams to slap them, as they’re almost always sent from North America.

SEO/marketing experts asking for links:

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This one gets me. It’s pretty brainless. We get a ton of these at work for any blog that we have our email address on the whois for. The idea is that if you ask nicely enough for a link (they *always* come from female, likely fake, names) someone will give you that link, and your google pagerank will be increased! In reality you are a spammer. It must work enough of the time that it makes it worth while for these people to do it. I try and spamcop these guys, but it’s like pissing in the ocean: the email sources and spamvertised sites are almost always in South America, Asia or eastern Europe. (This particular one came from some ISP in Argentina) I have a feeling they are usually fronts for something else, (get a pseudo legit page pageranked up, use it to then push other pages up) as no legit page bulk emails out begging for links.

People selling ads/ad network services:

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I save the best for last. These are the most ironic and we get them from time to time at work. People spam our own sites essentially offering their own advertising services. It’s even better (ironic), like in the above example, when they are spamming an obvious campaign site, showing there is likely no human intervention in the spam. They’re just looking for well pageranked sites and spamming the owners. This again begs the question, who actually receives one of these and takes them up on their most reputable (lol) offers. Sadly some people must to make it worth while. Since these are all pseudo legit (wannabe) marketing companies, they’re almost always in the US, so spamcop for great justice.

We received a good one from a company selling a Twitter trending solution recently, again well targeted against an actual twitter-based campaign site, but it begs the question of how new are these people to the internet. How is it, that in 2010 there are people out there who still believe their business has any legitimacy as soon as they send out unsolicited-bulk email to the same people who have been fighting such email for nearly *20 years*. In short, stop buying services/products you see in spam, have sweet dreams of useless ICANN actually enforcing the bulk-whois-marketing rule instead of ignoring registrars who allow it willy-nilly, and spamcop everything for great justice.

And to “Data Centers Canada Inc.”, “Comodus” and “Linkstar”, congrats you are spammers, any hopes you had of every being taken seriously as legit businesses went down the drain when you sent out unsolicited bulk email to domain owners, no matter how well targeted it was.

Some Italian high school students uploaded a video of an autistic classmate to Google video. Let me start by saying this is terrible and cruel, and I cannot even imagine how cruel bullying must be in a post internet world. Google complied with the Italian law enforcement and handed over the details of the users who uploaded it. This is correct practice. If someone breaks the law, even if its over the internet, they are prosecutable, and content hosts are responsible to comply with law enforcement. I have done this many times and complied with Canadian law enforcement on some very interesting cases.

Apparently though this is not enough in Italy. Four Google Italy employees, including one who had left the company in 2008 were arrested, of which 3 were convicted of violating the videoed boy’s privacy rights. The courts demand that Google should have vetted the privacy of the content that was uploaded before sharing it with the world. REALLY? I mean are they serious? I’m sure they must realize how many videos are uploaded to Google/Youtube/etc every minute of every day? And to check to make sure EVERYONE in the video has signed a release as to their privacy? Heck its not feasible at a few videos per day, let alone the 20 hours of video uploaded to Youtube alone every minute of every day. This would be stupid coming from an armchair politician bitching on an internet forum, let alone the policy makers of an entire country. Seriously this worries me about the sanity of the law makers and future of the country.

It doesn’t stop at video, it could be pictures uploaded to Facebook, of which there are over a hundred million PER DAY. Should Facebook check EVERY photo to make sure nobodies privacy is being encroached upon? Get a clue!

My other complaint is why does every local government think they should be able to police the internet? I think Google should just pull its local offices out of Italy and then just let Italy decide if they want to block Google or not. Let all these insane countries play internet nanny for their citizens, maybe they can get a bulk deal on Cisco gear along with China and Australia… Hey Italy thanks for Ferrari but no thanks for your draconian attempts at internet policy!

Read Google’s own blog post on the matter…

First off, I migrated my personal email over to Google’s hosted domain service. This is something I had wanted to do for a long time, but laziness had prevented the migration. To be fair I had been forwarding my email through Google for their superior spam filtering prowess for years anyway. The interface for creating and maintaining services in Google Apps is, as expected, very polished. I was mostly impressed with the way Google handles distribution lists, which they call groups. A lot more powerful than our old vpopmail alias. And as anyone who has ever used Google’s hosted mail will tell you, they have seven MX servers, a touch more reliable than my single qmail install on an ancient webserver. Plus admining mailservers is rubbish work! Just ask anyone who has had the misfortune of doing it professionally…

So one of the things I’ve enjoyed for years is vanity searching, ego searching, whatever you want to call Googling (previously Altavista’ing and previously Yahoo’ing) my own name. Sarah, Tom and I also have a bit of search result rivalry. I generally win the top search result for Kavassalis (though this differs depending on search location). This is mostly due to the fact that Google likes me hoarding and cross linking all the Kavassalis.* domains. It also loves me due to some links from blogs and stuff like flickr and other social networking junk. Amusingly though, Sarah is the top search suggestion, followed by Tom, followed by a conspiracy nut who’s name is unfortunately often dislexic-ally misspelled as Kavassalis. This by my logic means that Sarah’s site should come up first, since thats most likely what someone will be looking for. So obviously Google’s metric is not quite perfect. I am pleased however that (in .ca) kavas is enough to get kavassalis as a suggestion. Ah the joys of having a last name that really does just belong to members of your own family…

Now onto the buzziest Google product of late, the Android. I really don’t like the Android. Well maybe thats a bit harsh. I am disappointed with Android. Let me start by explaining why before the cult of (XYZ phone/operating system/game console) groupies flood my inbox with emails telling me how stupid I am. Lets segway to video games for a second. Console gaming and PC gaming have always had a vast gap in overall experience in a post DOS/Amiga world. Simply put, console games just work. There is no weird artifacting because you a strange video card, there is no slow down because you don’t have the newest CPU, and there are no random crashes because it doesn’t like some random driver. Common hardware, common resolutions == better development and user experience.

Back to phones though, Android’s spec should have included classifications on CPU, GPU power and screen size. Maybe call those early 320 x 480 528mhz devices Android Class1, and these 600 x 854 600mhz devices Android Class2. Device capability fragmentation is going to make the overall Android experience limited, and certainly will not allow it to become a casual gaming and consumer software consumption platform the way the iPhone has. Some phones like the Motorola Droid are absolutely phenomenal. But even if you follow the proper non pixel based UI procedures, you may produce apps that are unreadable or too slow on something like a lesser HTC Dream. (I mean the res gap on some Android phones is the same 2x factor between most netbooks and some higher-end 15″ laptops) For tech savvy users this won’t be a problem, we’ll understand why something isn’t working well or looking right, but we aren’t the bulk of consumers, we don’t push a platform to prominence. Remember, where there are consumers there will be good software. Don’t get me wrong, I don’t think the Android has bad software, Google’s first party apps are fantastic in fact, but I’m not going to see the plethora of high quality third party software without a big user base willing to buy software. Android will become the #1 phone platform, without a doubt, but if users don’t feel confident that software they buy will work right, they aren’t going to bring the dollars. Open source projects will always be more prominent on the Android platform than others due to the nature of how the Android project is maintained, but before I am flooded with hate mail from the Slashdot crowd, the majority of open source mobile/desktop apps are just not up to UI snuff with their commercial counter parts. Fact. (GIMP sucks, ok?)

I’m very interested in seeing how (if) Apple will tackle this problem, and I think it may end up causing some heartache in iPhone land. Already there is a good memory and small CPU bump between the 3G and 3GS, while developers can detect and profile their code for each phone, most don’t. And frankly doing so is a great deal of added work, plus users really aren’t going to like a heavily degraded experience either. This means that on most cutting edge apps, there will be tons of bad reviews from 3G and a plethora of iPod touch owners complaining of lag and stutter. Fast forward to the next gen iPhone. I full well assume Apple is going to up the game and release a phone with the same chip as in the iPad, the 1ghz ARM7, Apple a4 or whatever it’s called. I believe they will have institute requirements/recommended flags in the Appstore, which sucks, but frankly leaving it completely up to developers isn’t really going to be a very good user experience either. This problem is 10-fold more difficult on the Android since there are TONS of third party phones. I’m not sure there really is a good solution. The phone market unfortunately won’t be happy with the same CPU/GPU/screen size in a device for 5-10 years like handheld gaming markets…

Really I’m not slagging the Android that much, there are great Android phones, and I’d certainly love a Motorola Droid as a dev platform, ssh client, email platform if it weren’t CDMA… The experience will be frankly no issue for savvy users, but I’d not buy my mom an Android, but I do plan on buying her an iPhone.

I guess thats all I have to say about Google and Google products for one day. I’ll close by saying my car shopping is weighing on my mind. However a new and stand-out choice in the world of very fast, 50/50 weight distributed, RWD sports vehicles has arisen. 2007 550i are only slightly more expensive than 2007 335Ci due to the magic of disproportional depreciation, packing in more power and WAY more tech and luxury. I’d definitely be happy with a 550i, nothing says eco and gas friendly like a big v8… nothing quite sounds like it either!

(Included photo is IEOY winners, illustrating they’re all either small and economical or wonderful BMW engines :P)