The Case for Google+

Since the July release of Google+, I have struggled to find a use for the service.  Don’t get me wrong, Google+ is actually a really well designed network.  The UI is clean, I love Circles which realistically display our relationships with others, and it has some pretty good integration into the rest of Google’s services.  Google has made a wonderful social networking platform with tons of potential, arguably more elegant and better designed than Facebook.  Yet, I can’t find a damn reason to use it.

Facebook, with its 700 Million+ users, is living proof of the economic power of “network externalities.”  The service becomes only as useful as the number of people who use it.  Seeing as how that number is more than twice the population of the United States, I’d say Facebook has a pretty damn strong network.  With upwards of 1000 friends, I’ve invested a lot of time, effort, and clicking “accept” on friend requests on Facebook to just pick up and move to a new system.  The fact is that I have upwards of 4 years of networking locked into Facebook’s closed walls.  It’s hard to move on, especially when the new system requires a Google Account.  It’s hard to move on from Facebook.  Love it or hate it, Facebook is the definition of “ubiquitous” and though often a kludge of a system, it gets the job done.

But I think there is a real point to Google+.

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The Digital Gravitas Guide to Browsers: 2011

It is hard for me to think of a software war that sees more action than the browser wars.  Today the browser is probably the single most important program on one’s computer.  We live in a world where not having a computer connected to the Internet is unthinkable (kinda makes me wonder how I survived my first 5 years with a computer, huh mom and dad?)  Yes, the browser is that indispensable window to the world that makes up most of our lives.  Name one other program in your arsenal that sends as much time running as the browser.

At anytime I have about 3 browsers on my computer, and I’m constantly cycling through them as my tastes change.  If I find a deficiency in one, I move to another for a time until something else arises.  However, on the whole I juggle my time between Safari 5 and Chrome 10 (mostly because Safari is needed for launching my school’s VPN).  RockMelt is used from time to time, though my love of the browser has waned overtime.  Firefox has long been absent from my arsenal because version 3.6 is pretty slow.

So today, with the release of the much-awaited Firefox 4 that vastly improves Mozilla’s offering, I’ve decided to compile a guide to browsers.  Hopefully you can all make some better-educated decisions about which programs you’ll allow on your computer.  Each has their pluses and minuses that I hope to weigh in on, from UI design and utility, performance and stability, and real world convenience of design.  As well, I will be running a few benchmarks to give you some quantifiable differences.  Pretty graphs and everything!  But don’t just look at the data, make sure to browse on and see my opinions on the real feel with each browser.

The test bed includes three benchmarks: the Webkit SunSpider JavaScript benchmark, the Acid3 test and Google’s V8 Benchmark as an alternative for JavaScript execution.  Each test was run three times on each browser (save for Acid3, which is unnecessary) and an average was compiled from the scores.  All tests are run on a mid-2010 15-inch MacBook Pro 2.4 GHz Core i5 with 4GB DDR3 RAM and the discrete graphics card on.  In order to be eligible the browser must be compliant with all modern standards and be relatively popular (sorry Opera!)  RockMelt is an exception because I want to give an idea what some specialized browsers can offer.  Our tested browsers include Safari 5, Firefox 4, Chrome 10, RockMelt 0.9.49 and Internet Explorer 9.

This is the Way the Internet Ends

Friday was the start of a timer, a timer that will countdown to an event that changes our lives forever.  We could have stopped it, I even warned about it in one of my first posts but no one listened.  They never do.  On friday, the last blocks of IPv4 addresses were given out to the Regional Internet Registries (RIRs) that further dole out addresses to end consumers and ISPs.  We are done, the well is dry, after those last addresses are used, no new devices can connect to the Internet.  IPv4, for the uninitiated, is the basic protocol of the Internet, the binary code that is assigned to each and every internet connected device.  It’s like your computer’s phone number.  While there are numerous technologies acting as intermediates in transmission of packets (subnets, VPNs, NAT – which we’ll come back to soon) in the end you need a sending IP address and a receiver address.  If you don’t have that, you don’t have a connection and you don’t have communication and you don’t have the internet.  Hence the problem.

IPv4 is a 32-bit address system, which means it theoretically accommodates ~4.3 billion addresses.  In the real world, there are about 3.7 billion and they’re almost all gone.  Internet traffic has exploded in the past few years, especially with the smartphone revolution.  The Asia-Pacific RIR has been burning through around 10 million addresses a month in 2010, according to ArsTechnica and they just got their last block.  The other RIRs for Africa, North America, Europe and South America have a little more time with less demand.  But there are now less than 100 million addresses left, and they will most definitely be eaten up in 2011.  This is the year the internet will reach its limits and we only have two solutions: NAT or IPv6.

NAT is network access translation, and is a technology that allows multiple devices to share a single IP address.  You see this often with public networks at your local Starbucks et al. While this works, it adds major complexity to communication, since your router is now going to have to do some major negotiation to figure out where to send data.  Usually a NAT system generates a “master address” from the public IP block and then dishes out private addresses (a special block of addresses meant for closed networks) to all the clients accessing it.  These days, your router already does this in some capacity, either with private addresses or subnet masks etc, but it isn’t mandatory.  In the end your computer still (in most cases) has its own IP address.  But that’s just not gonna cut it much longer.  NAT is a stop-gap solution at best, it allows for more clients to join the internet but adds complexity and reduces performance in non-trivial ways.  It also makes some protocols unreliable.

Picture the internet as a city with traffic.  As more and more people have to go to work, they buy cars (addresses) and add to congestion on the roads.  Eventually, congestion got so bad that people started to carpool.  But demand continues to increase to the point where there are too many carpools, so now they switch to minivans (NAT) in order to reduce the vehicles (addresses) being used by singular people.  Now, carpools are becoming so important that they go to multiple destinations, not just the same “office” for similar people (information packets).  Right now, we are entering the “minivan stage” and it won’t be long until those “minivans” have to run all over the city because they are carrying “people” to completely different end destinations.  And no, there is no HOV lane.

Despite New Urbanism advocates who love the concept of carpools, that model doesn’t work on the internet.  Things work best if there is an end-to-end connection between the sender and receiver.  There’s already tons of translation, masking, tunneling, and security protocols that packets go through to get to their destination, so adding the NAT layer only increases complexity even further.  The silver bullet to this is IPv6, the 128-bit technology meant to replace IPv4…. 15 years ago.  Being 128-bit means that there are virtually unlimited amounts of addresses to use.  Every person on earth could have as many IPv6 addresses as the entire IPv4 pool each, and there would still be plenty left over.  IPv6, in the concept of our “city” model would be if the everyone switched to flying cars and the entire city was 3 miles high – nearly unlimited flight space.

However, as of today, IPv6 is implemented by about .5% of the internet.  Transition has been almost non-existent because 1) ISPs are notoriously slow to start implementing an IPv6 leasing system and 2) most home users are not configured to support it.  As such, a transition phase will require a lot of translation between IPv6 and IPv4 traffic.  But is has to happen.

We have a year guys, a year at most to get this right.  After that…. things are gonna get really rough out there on the seas of the internet.

Need Some Help Figuring Out the Web? Ask Google

In the past decade, Google has done a lot to sort through the chaos of the internet to make it accessible to us.  Their algorithms have provided us with the most powerful search engine on earth, one that can scour petabytes of information in seconds to give you reliable websites and services for information.  They’ve also expanded into a variety of wonderful and extensive web applications like Google Docs and Youtube which are now integral to our internet lives.  Yet despite all this, the internet can still be a mystery.  People often use these services all day, but don’t really know how it works or what it really is.  What is cloud computing, really?  Or cookies?  Or HTML5?

Well Google wants to help.  And today they have published a sort of digital children’s book called 20 Things I Learned About Browsers and The Web.  It behaves kind of like an Apple iBook, but uses HTML5 to simulate the animations.  In reality, the “book” explains in plain english a lot of terms that are now common in internet speak, but not always fully comprehended.  It starts off with big concepts like cloud computing and HTML and Javascript, and then starts to delve more in-depth into topics like security and protecting against malware.  I recommend checking it out, it’s a really simple read that pretty much sums up these complex topics with minimal techn0-babble.  If nothing else, it’s a great demonstration of HTML5’s interactivity.  I would be remiss if I didn’t point out the service is a little bit of a Google love-fest.  They spend an awful lot of time name dropping their own services, reminding you consistently how much they own you.  But hey, it’s their product, let them market it.

Check out the digital comic here.

Lessons Learned From FML

Oh F my Life, what would I do with my day if I didn’t have you to distract me from work?  I can’t imagine the number of darkly comedic hours I have spent on the site, gleaning through the painful snafus of America’s population.  It’s actually a quite novel idea: an internet forum solely devoted to the shit that happens in our lives.  The all too common errors and horribly ironic incidents that plague modern society.  Some call it a practice of social sadism – place for some to take pleasure in the pain of others (and how?)  However, others seem this form of cyber-schadenfreude as really an exercise in massive-scale community camaraderie.  It’s a place we can go to see that everyone has it bad, or at least you don’t have it as bad as others.  We all make mistakes.  Terrible accidents, embarrassing situations, and too many drunk exploits – they happen to everyone (present company excluded).  Yet, besides from the gleeful giggles and embarrassing posts that fill the pages of FML, there might be something to actually learn from the site.  Well…. not exactly learn, but there’s certainly a whole bunch of messages.

You are Bad Parents

How many times have I logged on to FML to see another sob story about someone being neglected by their parents?  I’ve seen the worst of it: judgmental parents telling their kids they’re fat, ugly, stupid, or a waste of money; parents who refuse to financially support not only adult children but minors; parents who steal money from their more successful kids; the list goes on and on.  If there’s one thing people can learn from FML, it is to NOT be these parents.  Parents of the world, the internet is not showing you in a good light.  So for the love of god, don’t sell your kid’s car to pay for your manicure; don’t run around naked in your home when you think the kids is away; and stop talking about your sex life!  Which brings me to my next point.

Could Google Be Your Next ISP?

Rhyming schemes aside, news this week has revealed that Google may be getting into the internet service provider business, adding yet another layer of domination to our digital lifestyle.  However, before we worry that Google is on the war path to control everything we know, remember that their motto is “Don’t Be Evil” and it shows here.  Google isn’t extending their corporate arm into the frustrating and draconian world of content delivery for profit or to extort their customers, they’re doing it to show how other companies should lay down broadband internet access in the future, and maybe even encourage the Obama Administration to be more proactive in improving our broadband infrastructure.

Google’s plan is actually nothing incredibly revolutionary.  What is exciting is that now a company is actually doing the obvious.  Google plans to begin laying down fiber-to-the-home broadband (FTTH) by hopefully next year.  Right now they are working on finding towns willing to participate in trials and acquiring stimulus money to finance their roll out.  FTTH is similar to Verizon’s FiOS system implement in many of their key markets and involves running fiber optic cable directly to homes for incredible speed.  Most systems like cable and DSL only use fiber cable up to a “node” which may service as much as 10000 homes with copper wiring running the last mile.  FTTP has an advantage of incredible speed (Google’s roll out may run as high as 1Gbps) but is also remarkably expensive as it requires companies to literally dig trenches to homes that require service in order to get the wires to the house.  Verizon has had to invest 10s of Billions of dollars in their FiOS system in order to make it practical.  The fact that Google is promising 1Gbps is really remarkable.  Verizon’s FiOS maxes at 50 Mbps download (about 1/20th of the speed), ADSL tops out at much lower speeds, and even DOCSIS 3.0 cable networks like Comcast top out at 50Mbps with a theoretical maximum still below 1Gbps (1000Mbps).

We're Running Out of Time

It’s something people don’t want to talk about.  Something we all forget amongst the other threats to our world and society – climate change, pollution, war, genocide.  They’re all extremely important causes to be sure.  But what if the internet halted?  That is part of the threat we are dealing with.  It won’t be a virus or terrorist attack or global meltdown of basic services.  It’s built in to the internet’s design.

The Internet was built in layers – levels of protocols meant to exchange “packets” (small bundles of data) between devices assigned IP addresses – like a phone number for devices connected to the internet.  Anyone who has a computer, phone, or game console connected to the internet has an IP address.  Chances are you’ve seen one without realizing it – numbers like 127.45.145.23 (a completely random example).  IP addresses are based on the protocol IPv4 which was released with the internet back in the early 90s when consumers could access it.  A large number of IP addresses were bought by corporations and government interests to be reserved for special use.  A large number were also bought by ISPs like Comcast, America Online, and Earthlink to name a few.  And today we all have IP addresses for every connected device.  But we won’t very soon.  IPv4 is a 32-bit address system, which means that it can support up to 2^32 unique addresses or about 4.3 Billion addresses ranging from 1.0.0.0 to 255.255.255.255 and every possible combination in between (though a large portion of the address space is heavily reserved).

Facebook is Dying

The past few weeks have been a frustration for me on Facebook – crashes, poor GUI glitches, and endless spam are destroying the site from the inside out.  It’s become more and more prevalent as the weeks have passed.  Facebook has always been a site with glitches, but things are coming to a head now.

Where did it start though?  The Facebook population would argue that Facebook changes the system too often.  There was HUGE backlash at the Facebook 2.0 update of 2008, where the entire site was rebuilt.  I liked the new design with the tabbed interface and concentration on the feeds instead of just walls.  Then they changed the Home page in early 2009 to simplify the aggregation of data from all your friends.  It simplified the design but also made stalking far easier… and you often learn things you just didn’t want to know.  Then they added the “Fan” system where you can become a fan of companies, musicians, actors, websites etc.  And that seemed like a great system for a while.  The recent change to the Home feed broke things down between Live Feed and News Feed.  Even I didn’t enjoy the recent change as the two feeds seem redundant and limit automatic updates.