Nowhere to hide: Advertisers can now stalk you across multiple devices

Advertisers want to compile as much information about you as possible. Tracking where you go, what you click, and how you search is literally their business. They use that data to target ads directly to you, and feed relevant data to their partners. With the increasing use of tablets and smartphones in daily life, advertisers have been frustrated by a limited ability to correlate traffic from multiple devices to a single person. Well, there is some good news for advertisers, but bad news for privacy advocates. A company by the name of Drawbridge has developed a system that will analyze known data from devices surfing from the same location, and supposedly pick out which devices belong to which user.

The Drawbridge system allows the advertisers to target a single person with a specific advertising campaign, regardless of what device you happen to be using at the time. Using a hugely parallel Hadoop infrastructure, it takes the data it has about your online profiles and your known locations, and analyzes the probability that two devices are being used by the same user. If you looked up video games recently on your MacBook Pro in Chrome, you’ll get to see ads for Call of Duty on your iPhone.

Drawbridge specifically says that it doesn’t use personally identifiable information, but it ismatching first-party cookie data from all of your devices. There is quite a bit of semantic hairsplitting going on here around what “personally identifiable” means.

Research has been done about how much data popular websites send to third-party companies, and the results are staggering. “… the Journal examined what happens when people logged in to roughly 70 popular websites that request a login and found that more than a quarter of the time, the sites passed along a user’s real name, email address or other personal details, such as username, to third-party companies.” Filling out forms truthfully, even on relatively popular and “safe” sites, can be very bad for your privacy.

How to prevent third parties from tracking you

If you don’t want advertisers stalking your movements around the web and compiling a massive amount of data about you, you do have options. First off, there is the Do Not Track (DNT) header. Now available in most browsers, this feature puts a specific statement in its communication with web servers that asks advertisers to opt the user out. While there has been proposed legislation about DNT, there currently isn’t any enforcement of websites to obey the DNT header. Even if there was some sort of enforcement, the shadiest off-shore tracking and ad companies would still skirt around it.

A large amount of tracking is done via JavaScript and cookies. Extensions like NoScript for Firefox, NotScripts for Chrome, and JavaScript Blocker for Safari give you control over which websites are allowed to run JavaScript in your desktop browser. The selection of JavaScript blocking utilities are more limited on mobile devices, but even Apple’s locked-down Safari browser has the ability to toggle off JavaScript completely when needed. As for cookies, most browsers have the built-in ability to turn off third-party cookies, so you should always use that feature unless you have a specific reason not to.

If you’re really worried about being tracked, you can use a Tor proxy to mask your identity by obscuring your browsing activity. The use of VPNs from other parts of the world will help reduce the ability of the advertisers to use geolocation to target you effectively.

If you’re sick and tired of advertisers watching your every move, you can take these steps, and you’ll be in a much better situation. However, the most important way to keep your information out of the hands of these third parties is to refrain from giving it out in the first place. Whenever possible, use fake names and burner email addresses to keep accounts from being correlated with a single person. There’s no guarantee that the brilliant minds behind these analytics and advertising companies won’t be able to thwart your efforts, but these steps will make their jobs a lot harder.

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Backup master class: Are online file lockers backup?

In our previous stories, we’ve discussed the overarching philosophy of backup and compared several of the more popular cloud backup services. Now, we’re turning our attention to file lockers/cyber lockers. Unlike online backup services, which have existed since long before anyone thought up the term “cloud computing”, cheap/free consumer-oriented file lockers are a fairly recent phenomenon — Microsoft’s SkyDrive debuted in 2007; Dropbox launched in 2008.

Cloud storage has also become extremely popular. Asus offers online storage as a perk with its tablets. Google, Amazon, and Microsoft all have their own versions; Dropbox passed the 50 million user mark a year ago. This article discusses file lockers in general, but since we’re primarily concerned with backup rather than file sharing, it can’t be characterized as a review.

Most cyberlockers prioritize their sharing capabilities and don’t literally refer to themselves as backup services — but the language is very similar. For example:

• Amazon Cloud: “Never worry about losing your precious photos, documents and videos. Store them in your Cloud Drive where they will be protected from a hard drive crash or a lost or stolen laptop.”
• Dropbox: Even if you accidentally spill a latte on your laptop, have no fear! You can relax knowing that Dropbox always has you covered, and none of your stuff will ever be
• Google Drive: “Things happen...  No matter what happens to your devices, your files are safely stored in Google Drive.” (emphasis original)
• Microsoft SkyDrive: “With SkyDrive, you can securely store your files.. The files and photos you store in SkyDrive are protected by first-rate security features.”

Do file lockers count as online backup services?

Yes and no. File lockers are backups in the sense that they store files in an offsite location. If your hard drive suddenly dies, the files you copied to a file locker will still be there. Like online backup services, most file lockers retain multiple versions of a file to allow you to revert changes to a document. Some also offer undelete protection; Microsoft’s SkyDrive recently implemented a Recycle Bin feature that allows you to recover files for up to 30 days after you’ve deleted them.

One of the key distinctions between a backup service and a file locker is that modern backup services typically auto-select key folders and files to back up by default. File lockers, in contrast, drop a new folder into Windows Explorer and have done. You can use Dropbox orGoogle Drive as a backup — provided that you manually configure all the files you want to back up to drop into appropriate subdirectories.

File lockers are often one component of a larger service, even if they’re offered to anyone who wants one. You don’t have to own a Kindle, use Google Docs, or make use of Microsoft’s various online services to use Cloud Drive, Google Drive, or Sky Drive, but all three companies make certain you’re aware of those options at each and every turn. Most content management is either handled in Windows Explorer or via a basic browser interface.

Cloud lockers also tend to handle sharing and locality differently than backup services. Mozy and Carbonite offer mobile clients that you can use to access archived data, but they don’t include external links that another person can use to access your files. As for locality, backup services nearly unilaterally insist that any data that’s to be kept backed up is also kept locally. Many file lockers offer a more nuanced policy.

Locality and synchronization

Google Drive and Dropbox both default to synching all files and folders. Upload something to Dropbox on System A, and it’ll be downloaded to System B. This keeps the files in sync and maintains copies on all your machines while also having a cloud copy stored.

Here is an example of what it looks like:

You can, however, disable this behavior on a folder-by-folder basis.

The advantage of being able to select which folders are synchronized is that it gives users the option to move data permanently off the hard drive. Not all cyberlockers offer this option (Amazon’s Cloud Drive doesn’t create a local folder for synchronization), and SkyDrive, in a rather puzzling move, only offers it as an all-or-nothing feature. You can sync SkyDrive with a PC, or you can opt not to, but there’s no way to selectively choose which folders are synchronized and which are not.

Unfortunately, even the cheapest file lockers are a poor fit for this type of storage on a large scale.

Capacity	Amazon Cloud Drive	Dropbox	Google Drive	Microsoft SkyDrive
Free	5GB	2GB	5GB	7GB
20GB / 25GB	$10	NA	$29.88	$10
50GB	$25	NA	NA	$25
100GB	$50	$99	$59.88	$50
200GB	$100.00	$199	$119.88	NA

Even the cheapest file lockers are far more expensive than what you’d pay for either local storage or an online backup service.  That holds true even when we consider the limited meaning of “unlimited’ storage. Even Mozy, which has a higher cost per GB than some of the cloud services, offers considerably more backup features for the money.

Conclusion:

File lockers make great sense if deployed as part of a device ecosystem (iCloud, Amazon Kindle, SkyDrive, etc), or if you need to share central data with a number of various systems. If you’re collaborating with a group or want to keep files constantly synched across a handful of devices, they’re a useful way to make that happen. They’re also a decent way to hedge your online backup bet, particularly if you can squeeze a small set of critical data into the free storage these services offer.

The one potential backup advantage of a file locker is that they synchronize aggressively. If you’ve just initiated a new backup plan with a cloud provider, it could take weeks — even months — to finish the entire process. It’s sometimes possible to tweak priority, but that depends on the individual program. Grab the most critical information and haul it into SkyDrive or Dropbox, and the program gets to work immediately.

Price scaling, unfortunately, makes them a bad option for offsite storage, and while they offer some of the same protections as full backup services, they aren’t a true replacement.

Read more: ExtremeTech’s backup series

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Facebook has 1 billion users, it’s time to leave

Facebook has reached a milestone of 1 billion users worldwide. Once exclusive to college students, it is now used by anyone willing to give the company a bit of personal information. After that’s done you can join the social network and connect with just about everyone you’ve ever met.

The social networking giant is not without its issues, however. As Facebook literally runs out of new users to recruit, it has us wondering — Is it set to be the next Myspace as frustrated users move onto the next big thing? There are some clear reasons why it’s time to go…

Facebook is a huge target

It is no secret that Facebook has a massive amount of data. Contact, financial, and personal information is stored on the company’s servers, and with 1 billion identities behind all that, it is a serious target to hackers. In the past, the service has had to contend with various scams, phishing schemes, and likely an inordinate amount of spam. As the service grows, it is likely that such tactics will only increase in addition to a resurgence of direct attacks as hackers attempt to get at user information stored in Facebook’s databases.

A Facebook data breach would essentially be the holy grail of hacks. The attackers would have access to sensitive personal information as well as a great deal of data to sift through in order to create more efficient password crackers based on patterns (one reason whyrandomly generated pass phrases from a password manager are a good idea).

Network effect gone wild

Along with the security aspects, the sheer amount of users and data flowing through the service has become overwhelming for many users. Despite the new Timeline profiles and beefed up filtering options in the news feed, friends are inundated with posts from status updates and application spam notifications. If you are in a group of friends, Facebook will even happily flood the home page with conversations between other people that do not even involve you, at least if you are not on top of your filtering efforts.

Basically, at some point, there is just too much data to sift through, and people will get burnt out by the service as Facebook becomes less fun and more like work (that you aren’t getting paid for, mind you). At least, personally, I’ve stopped using Facebook for anything besides PMs, and the only thing keeping me doing that much is that it is easier for my family to use Facebook messages and IMs than to use email. A quick scroll through my news feed quickly reminds me why I stopped regularly checking in.

Obligatory friending/liking/sharing

With 1 billion users, you are now able to connect to family, friends, and everyone at your school or within your organization. Myspace was the go-to place years ago, but was overtaken by Facebook as it represented thing that seemed more exclusive. Your parents and co-workers (as great as they are) were not on it yet, so you were able to be a bit more relaxed with conversations and opinion sharing. Now the cycle is repeating, as everyone in your life moves over to Facebook to connect with you. In that respect, Facebook has lost a lot of its initial appeal and luster.

Slower moving and more corporate

When Facebook was a younger service without shareholders to please, it seemed like a more flexible company. Facebook was able to try out new things, quickly roll out new features, and re-invent itself to innovate and keep users happy. Flexibility does not seem to be a trait of Facebook anymore, however. The company’s last big news was Timeline and then their purchase of up-and-coming photo sharing service Instagram… six months ago. Yes, Facebook seemingly figuring out a good formula for keeping — and monetizing — users is a good thing for (stock ticker symbol) FB but that doesn’t mean it’s the best for users.

And there is a good deal of competition out there with Google+, Twitter, and an overhauled Myspace that is attempting to woo users back with touch friendly UI (OK, maybe that’s a less serious threat, but at least they are trying new things). Granted, these services are not quite ready to take on Facebook, but they are innovating and it is only a matter of time before users start taking notice. Along the same lines was Diaspora, which ended up being a spectacular failure, but not before garnering a huge amount of attention.

Facebook is the social networking giant today, but it’s possible that it’s grown too large to sustain itself. Is the social networking cycle due to come around again or has Facebook’s size and war chest mean that it’ll be on top for the foreseeable future?

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YouTube kicks copyright foxes out of henhouse, won’t admit it invited them

Automatic content filters have taken a hammering of late. False claims of copyright took down early footage of the Mars rover, Curiosity, cut off the Ustream broadcast of the 2012 Hugo awards, blocked footage of President Obama engaging in a bit of karaoke, and a great deal of other content. Yesterday YouTube announced that it would no longer completely automate the copyright claim/video removal process. As of today, eligible users will be able to dispute a copyright claim against their videos. If the copyright holder decides to push forward with their own allegations of infringement, they’ll have to file a formal DMCA notification.

That sounds great, but as Patrick McKay, founder of FairUseTube.org points out, that’s how the system was already supposed to work. According to McKay, YouTube’s new policy is actually a return to the company’s old policy — a policy it never admitted that it stopped using.

YouTube’s blog post yesterday partially confirms McKay’s previous allegations that the company had adopted policies that left contributors with no way to reclaim their own work. The post’s author, Thabet Alfishawi, stated that “Prior to today, if a content owner rejected that dispute, the user was left with no recourse for certain types of Content ID claims (e.g., monetize claims).” In other words, a company could walk in and claim copyright on a personal video in order to make money off it, while the uploader/creator was left holding the bag.

According to YouTube’s content dispute page, only eligible uploaders may appeal a copyright decision. Eligibility is determined by being in “good copyright standing,” the date of the dispute, and “other factors.” If an uploader appeals and the alleged copyright owner chooses to file a DMCA notice, the uploader still receives a copyright strike. Three strikes, and you’re out — regardless of whether the company filing the DMCA notification prevails in a court of law.

Still, this change is an improvement, and McKay describes himself as “cautiously optimistic.” Hopefully this announcement actually heralds real positive change rather than serving as an admission of lousy policy. YouTube’s promise that it cares about user feedback would ring truer if the company had simultaneously instituted a policy of requiring copyright holders to be in good standing in order to assert ownership or have their DMCA notifications count against a user’s account. Foreign companies have little reason to fear the consequences of filing DMCA notifications in bad faith, while legitimate uploaders can have their accounts shut off.

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Can you patent a hyperlink? Patent trolls sure think so

The New York Times has decided to take on the noble task of battling the scum of the Earth: patent trolls.

Rather that cave into one troll’s ludicrous monetary demand for what essentially is the basis of the internet, the Times’ lawyers have headed for the court room, says the Associated Press. At issue? Hyperlinks in text messages.

As unbelievable as it sounds, a Chicago-based firm called Helferich Patent Licensing LLC owns that patent, which its founder Richard Helefrich filed for in 1997. So far nearly 100 companies have settled with HPL for the $750,000 licensing fee, meaning a patent that you’d think would be ludicrous has earned its owner at least $75 million, if not more.

Now, I’ll concede here that Helferich did indeed file with the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office on how hyperlinks would work in texts while texting itself was in its infancy, so kudos to him for being a smart entrepreneur. What exactly is the real invention here, though? The Times’ lawyers seem to agree, and are paying for the USPTO to review HPL’s patents. One has already been overturned. This is no solace to all those companies who paid up and are now S.O.L., as they say.

Take this and shut up

Such a move isn’t unusual at all. Paying up quickly is typically the wisest option for companies dealing with relatively minor patent spats, as the cost of fighting it in court may be far more than the license itself. Patent defense consultancy PatentFreedom found that the average patent defense costs a company anywhere between $1 to $5 million. Thus a court battle isn’t always the best idea financially, despite how frustrating it is to watch those victims feed the trolls.

What’s sad is is that this is not the first time somebody’s tried to make money off of the good ol’ hyperlink. Some may remember British Telecom’s attempt at patenting hyperlinks back in the early 2000s. After “discovering” the patent during a review of its holdings, the company then attempted to force ISPs to obtain a license to link, which would have almost certainly resulted in higher monthly fees for internet users — and probably the death of the web. The courts found that ISPs, Prodigy in particular, didn’t infringe on BT’s patent and threw the case out.

Helferich isn’t the first troll by any means to try to cash in on the basics of the web as we know it. But his and the actions of those trolls before him are a clear sign why the whole system needs to be reformed.

Even the judges are tired of it

Federal appeals court judge Richard Posner, best known to techies for his work in the Apple vs. Motorola patent case, argued just that in a opinion piece for The Atlantic last month. “A patent blocks competition within the patent’s scope and so if a firm has enough patents it may be able to monopolize its market. This prospect gives rise to two wasteful phenomena: defensive patenting and patent trolls,” he wrote.

Posner explained that with so much litigation surrounding patents right now, companies are patenting things not because they fear being copied by others, but rather they fear getting sued. “ The cost of patenting and the cost of resolving disputes that may arise when competitors have patents are a social waste,” he argued.

So how do we fix the system? That’s a great question. Posner recommends that the government better staff the USPTO so that reviews of patent applications are much more thorough. This would prevent a boatload of bogus patents from ever seeing the light of day, and would also reduce the amount of litigation.

However when it comes to patent trolls, maybe it’s time to no longer allow a company to hold and sue on a patent for technologies it does not produce a physical product for. That would end nearly every patent lawsuit, and the ones we’d be left with are legitimate cases of infringement.

Read: The Patent War: Is it killing innovation? and Verdict reached in Apple/Samsung case, finds Samsung guilty of massive infringement

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IBM working on Watson app for smartphones

After conquering Jeopardy, battling patent trolls, and chasing down health insurance fraudsters, IBM now plans to bring Watson to smartphones. Watson is an artificial intelligence that is capable of answering very complex questions using natural language answers. In essence, IBM is hoping to build a better, faster, and more professional/enterprisey version of Apple’s Siri, the voice-controlled assistant that debuted on the iPhone 4S.

Each IBM Watson installation is a 10-rack supercomputer with a total of 2880 processor threads (90 Power7 CPUs clocked at 3.5GHz, each with eight cores, and each core with four threads). There is 16TB of RAM, and the entire thing is embarrassingly parallel — it can process 500 gigabytes of data per second. Watson runs IBM’s DeepQA software, which basically pores through millions of books and documents — dictionaries, encyclopedias, research papers, enws documents — and then uses that data to answer questions with remarkable speed and accuracy.

Now, don’t worry — IBM isn’t trying to shrink the room-sized Watson down to the size of a smartphone. Instead, we’re simply looking at a smartphone app that directly interfaces with an internet-connected Watson installation. It would work in a very similar way to Siri orGoogle Now, which both send your voice clip off to the cloud for processing.

In theory, Watson’s question answering ability would utterly blow Siri and Google Now out of the water, though. While Siri can set your alarms, Watson can parse a patient’s charts and provide clinical diagnoses and pharmaceutical prescriptions. Where Siri can tell you whether you’ll need an umbrella, you could ask Watson whether now is the right time to plant your crops — or for a complete walkthrough on how to fix your toaster.

As far as I can tell, IBM could roll out a Watson smartphone app today — if the company could work out how to price and deliver it. The problem with Watson is that it takes a long time to learn a given subject — and even after months of feeding data into Watson, it can still only answer questions that belong to that specific domain. The Watson that can diagnose cancer can’t answer questions about planting crops — you’d need a complete Watson installation just to answer agricultural queries. Considering each Watson costs around $3 million, that’s an expensive proposition.

As a result, and given IBM’s business and enterprise expertise, the smartphone version of IBM Watson will almost certainly be a business app, rather than a consumer app. There’s always the possibility that, say, a mobile carrier buys an IBM Watson and then forwards the service to its customers. You can also foresee a future where Microsoft uses a Watson to provide excellent, instantaneous customer service to its customers.

Moving forward, IBM tells Bloomberg that the plan is to give Watson more “senses.” At the moment Watson can only respond to strings of text (i.e. typed in). Watson 2.0 (no ETA) will hopefully have voice recognition (courtesy of a partnership with Nuance, the company behind Siri’s voice recognition module), and image recognition — so instead of asking a question, Watson will simply interpret whatever your smartphone’s being pointed at, be it a broken toaster, an empty field, or a lump in your breast.

Read: IBM Watson to replace salespeople and cold-calling telemarketers and Watson to battle patent trolls

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Verdict reached in Apple/Samsung case, finds Samsung guilty of massive infringement

In the fast-moving tech industry, most battles are won and lost in the market, not the court room. Courts are designed to move slowly and allow time for each side to make a case, conduct depositions, and call witnesses. More often than not, court cases function as mopping-up actions to redress alleged financial wrondoings long after the products and patents being fought over have faded from the public’s eye.

The epic Apple vs. Samsung trial, in contrast, will have an enormous impact on the ongoing operations of both companies. For months, the two companies have slugged it out in public, in court filings, and in the court itself. The situation has so frustrated Judge Lucy Koh that she memorably asked Apple’s lawyers if they were smoking crack during one phase of the trial. Apple has alleged that Samsung diluted its trademarks, damaged the market value of the iPhone, and sought to deliberately copy Apple’s designs. Samsung countered by claiming that iPhone-like designs existed prior to Apple’s work and that its own products were differentiated from Apple’s and not confused by customers.

The verdict today arrives a surprisingly short amount of time after the case went to jury. Despite being handed hundreds of pages of legal documents and extremely detailed instructions, the jury has never requested clarification or to hear certain testimony read again.

The verdict is rolling in as I type this, and the results aren’t good for Samsung. Massive and multiple counts of infringement across a wide range of products. I’ll continue updating this post as parts of the verdict are read, but this is going to be huge. Depending on damages and the specific nature of the penalty, it could torpedo Samsung’s Android business or require the company to pay huge damages.

Samsung will undoubtedly appeal the verdict, but this is still a huge blow. Samsung lost virtually every argument it made — none of its counter-claims against Apple appear to have been upheld, all of Apple’s patents were ruled valid, and the total damages assessed to Samsung is a bit over a billion dollars ($1,055,855,000 for the curious). Samsung has also been barred by patent exhaustion from bringing cases against Apple as they relate to certain patents (’516, ’941 are the patents in question).

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Google’s Knowledge Graph: Wikipedia on steroids, or the beginning of the end for the web?

Further establishing itself as the Borg of the web, Google is adding a Knowledge Graph capability to its search engine. Simply put, Google will now try and answer your question right on the search results page — no need to actually visit Wikipedia or your favorite travel information site when Google can simply absorb their data and present it to you nicely formatted along with a few choice ads. Google already has most of the video content on the web through YouTube, most of the geographic information through Maps and Earth, and an increasing share of the email, so why not? The user gets a quicker, and likely more useful, set of facts about their search.

At a glance, faster results are a no-brainer benefit for everyone. But like the spread of cheap, imported goods, there is a corrosive downside. Web publishers get cut out of the loop, risking their business models and ability to create the content that we all rely on. Google risks crushing the web in its embrace — unintentionally loving it to death. Looking more closely at Knowledge graph shows how the process works and why you may want to worry more than a little about it.

The Google Knowledge Graph — Baby steps to an information monopoly?

Google’s Knowledge Graph is brand new — “only” containing an estimated 3.5 billion facts about 500 million objects — but of course it will grow as rapidly as the Googleplex can organize additional information. Even now it is a powerful tool for those who want quick answers, and don’t like wasting their time surfing to get them — loosely described as semantic search. For comparison, Wikipedia currently has less than 30 million pages. When Google decides a search is about one of the 500 million objects it has categorized, it displays the facts it has about that object in a separate “knowledge panel” on the right of the page. Traditional search results and ads appear in the main body of the page on the left.

Google’s Knowledge Graph shows not just links for the Bronx Zoo, but a panel of facts on the right-hand side of the page

You can see here that Google has pulled out a map showing the location of the Zoo, along with some facts from Wikipedia — which to its credit are linked and attributed to Wikipedia. It also shows me other topics that those curious about the Bronx Zoo are interested in. Interestingly, the knowledge panel is less useful in this case than the first search result — which reports the top links from the Bronx Zoo site itself — but for many topics which don’t have a definitive website the knowledge panel is a handy place to get started with research.

Google vs. Bing: Do you trust the web or your friends?

While Google is using brute force to tame all the information on the planet in its effort to bootstrap the semantic web, Bing is taking a more surgical, and social, approach — by sifting through data about and from your friends to decide what might be important to you. Once you turn on Bing’s new Sidebar and sign into Facebook, Bing will happily crawl through any and all information it can find in your friends’ profiles or posts to cough up a variety of factoids. Some can be very useful — like a friend’s photo album from a place you’re interested in visiting, or the fact that someone has just reviewed a movie you’re curious about. Others are at best trivia — like the information that a long-lost business colleague used to live 100 miles from a place you’re considering for vacation, or that the musician “Taj Mahal” recently tweeted, shown in response to an attempt to find out which friends might know something about the Taj Mahal in India.

Comparing the two, so far I’d give the edge to Google and the Knowledge Graph. Useful snippets from friends (and I’ve got around 800 FB friends, so that should be a good sample) are few and far between in my efforts to use the new Bing sidebar. I can see that with time and improved linking technology the amount of useful information from friends will improve, but it’s hard to guess by how much. For my Bronx Zoo example, Bing’s sidebar coughed up a photo of a friend’s daughter, presumably taken at the zoo, as well as letting me know that two of my friends used to live in north New Jersey towns. None of it very useful in planning my event there.

Bing also offers an “ask friends” where I can ask my friends to help me with a search. Frankly, I’m not willing to even experiment with that. If I have a topic that I’m not sure how to approach, I’m old-fashioned enough to mail a couple friends who I think might be able to help out. So posting a search would only be useful if I could make it visible to just a few friends, instead of all 800 — but that doesn’t seem possible yet. Ironically, because of the way Google+ got started — with circles from the beginning — the same idea might actually work for me if Google implemented it so that I could ask a particular circle. Hopefully Bing will also allow the feature to be restricted to particular lists of friends.

One advantage of Bing’s Social Search over Google’s Search Plus Your World, at least for me, is that Bing clearly separates the social results from web search results. It is confusing and frankly a little weird to be doing a web search on Google and have various posts and articles written by me or my friends mixed willy-nilly into the results. Sometimes they’re useful, but other times they just get in the way since I’m really trying to look outward for new information, not navel-gazing by re-reading my old articles.

Knowledge Graph: The end of web publishing?

Like the snake that eats its own tail, there is a very serious problem with the way Google’s Knowledge Graph is likely to grow. Over time it will pull more and more information into its database — likely it has already swallowed the useful parts of Wikipedia — and give users less reason to actually traverse the web and visit any of the sites from which it has gotten its information. In turn, of course, that will starve those sites of needed revenue (or in the case of Wikipedia, attention and donations) and cause them to slow their acquisition and publication of knowledge. How long will it be before the “Report a Problem” feature of Google’s Knowledge Graph becomes more important to the web than submitting a correction through the arduous Wikipedia edit and review process? The resulting paradigm clearly isn’t stable.

This problem isn’t lost on Google, although its current answers aren’t particularly satisfying. Google’s executive in charge of search, Amit Singhal, says that as search engines improve, users perform more searches and also create more traffic to external websites. The trouble with that bromide is that in the past the improvements have been related to providing more accurate links to external sites — inviting increased browsing — and now they are being geared at providing answers directly on the Google site, which is an entirely different thing that might well decrease subsequent browsing.

Google’s head of Search, Amit Singhal, at SMX on the issue of how Google’s Knowledge Graph affects publishers.

Singhal also explains that to survive websites have to move further up the value chain, and not simply answer questions the search engine is able to. He uses the annoying and trivial example of a site providing the answer to “2+2.” Unfortunately, that answer shows the issue isn’t really deeply concerning to him, and apparently to Google. There is no “bright-line rule” beyond which Google won’t venture, only practical limits on its technology. This sounds very similar to the issue with PC utility software vendors providing services which are eventually bundled into the operating system. Realistically, it’s a warning shot across the bow of publishers that Google considers anything anyone wants to know as fair game, and if it can figure out how to provide that knowledge within its ecosystem and keep all the money — it will.

Once Google has effectively tied its Knowledge Graph into its digitized library of almost every book on the planet and scraped the contents of the semantic web into its Googleplex, it will have a practical monopoly on access to many kinds of information — even if you have a site with some other perspective, users will likely need to find it through Google. Public opinion, and in turn public policy, will get shaped by which factoids Google serves up in response to controversial searches like “climate change” or “intellectual property protection.”

Google Knowledge Graph results for global warming feature a well-known climate skeptic and an activist. Fair and balanced, maybe, but certainly a step towards editorial control coming from Google.

There is something more than a little insidious and even terrifying about this prospect. By declaring itself a repository of knowledge, rather than just an honest broker providing equal access to resources on the web, Google is making itself the sole arbiter of truth — or at least sole editor of the presented truth. Even Wikipedia provides an open, community-driven, process for editing, reviewing, and correcting facts as part of serving the community. If Google continues down its current path without articulating a clear set of transparent checks, balance, and access rules — or limiting itself to the role of a “common carrier” for the web’s information — it is likely we’ll soon hear a clamor for extending anti-trust regulations to limit monopolies on the access to knowledge.

Read more about Knowledge Graph, or the semantic web

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How Google Drive just ate SkyDrive’s lunch

Today’s debut of Google Drive is case-in-point why you never show your hand first. Yesterday Microsoft detailed plans for SkyDrive, aimed at giving Redmond a leg up in the competitive cloud storage space. Today’s Google Drive announcement blows SkyDrive out of the water.

Even though Google Drive offers two less gigabytes of space (5GB versus 7GB for SkyDrive), the tie-ins with other Google services are the difference. For example, Google takes Google Docs and incorporates it into Google Drive. Like the standalone product, users are able to collaborate on content, which can then be commented on by anyone who its shared with.

Google Drive also offers drag-and-drop integration for both the Windows and OS X, and mobile access through individual apps for iOS (once the app is available) and Android, just like SkyDrive. Fair enough — but where Drive really shines is in search.

Google makes everything that you upload into Drive searchable. The content of scanned documents is searchable through Optical Character Recognition (OCR) technology, and the company says image recognition technology will do the same for your images. That last part may be a little too much for some, but it is still more than Microsoft offers.

The only place Microsoft bests Google Drive is on extra storage. An extra 20GB of space (27GB total) on SkyDrive costs $10 yearly, with Google that will set you back about $30, billed $2.49 monthly. 100GB of space on Google Drive is $4.99 monthly or about $60 per year, with SkyDrive 100GB extra runs $50 per year.

Not to be outdone, Google offers additional capacity upgrades of 200GB to 16TB, ranging in price from $9.99 to $799.99 per month. That’s a lot more space than most of us will ever need, but the option is there.

Bottom line? Google Drive just ate SkyDrive’s lunch. Why did Microsoft let this happen in the first place, though? The company panicked we’re told.

Sources close to Microsoft tell ExtremeTech that the SkyDrive update was originally intended to launch next Monday (April 30th), but a decision was made to move the launch up one week based on the Drive rumors. There was a desire to get out first inside the company, it seems, although I am not sure they expected Google to launch the very next day.

Microsoft now finds itself in a predicament. Only a day old, the new SkyDrive already looks dated and nothing more than your average cloud storage service. On the other hand, Google comes out offering a set of compelling features above and beyond storage. Could Microsoft more tightly wound Bing into SkyDrive? It certainly could have. Microsoft does offer web versions of its Office platform to SkyDrive users, but they don’t seem as fleshed out and full-featured as Google Docs.

I have never been a fan of kneejerk reactions to the market as it leads to poor business decisions, which may have been the case here. Microsoft may have been best leaving to its original April 30 launch date to one-up Google rather than have its announcement overshadowed by its rival. Google wins again, and Microsoft is left scrambling to compete.

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Firefox 12 released, takes Chrome mimicry to the next level

Though version numbers are fairly meaningless at this point, I am happy to announce that Firefox 12 has been officially released. There are two major changes: Moving forward, Firefox (on Windows) will automatically (and silently) update, and — praise be — the Find function is now a lot better at centering the page on any matches.

The ability to silently update very closely mirrors Chrome, and really it’s a surprise that Mozilla has taken so long to introduce this key feature, after switching to the six-week rapid release cycle almost a year ago, with Firefox 5. While making the update process opt-in sounds like the right thing to do, it has basically resulted in a very fragmented install base. When Chrome updates, almost everyone immediately moves to the new version — Mozilla, on the other hand, now has lots and lots of users spread out across a huge range of browsers, dating all the way back to Firefox 3.

When you install Firefox 12, Windows UAC will ask you to approve Firefox Software Updater — and after that, you should never see an update dialog ever again.

Updated @ 14:55: You can disable automatic updates by going to Options > Advanced > Updates.

Unfortunately, despite what we previously reported, neither the New Tab Page or Home Tab made it into Firefox 12. Both features should arrive with Firefox 13, however — in just six weeks from now!

In other news, the latest Nightly version of Firefox 14 has removed favicons from the address bar; the icon will now simply display a globe, or a padlock if the site is SSL-secured — just like Chrome. This is primarily a security fix: Nefarious websites could use a padlock favicon to trick users into thinking that the site is secure.

You can download Firefox 12 from the official website, or if you already use Firefox your browser should prompt you to update soon. Check out the official Mozilla blog for the full release notes.

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