Things Are Gettin’ Greener On The Server Farm
[ Add A Comment ]Posted on October 26, 2011 by admin in Clean & Green
Wednesday, October 26th, 2011Did you know that two Google searches generate as much CO2 as boiling water on your stovetop? Big tech companies are finally taking bigger steps toward addressing their data center’s environmental impact, which often rivals that of entire cities.
A couple of years ago, we talked about your Facebook Footprint, pointing out that two Google searches produce the same amount of CO2 as boiling water on your stovetop, and that Facebook has a carbon footprint equal to half of New York City. So have things changed much? You’d like to think that the brightest minds at innovative companies like Google would have a solid forward vision as they build the massive data centers that power the things that you do every day on the web, but do they? Well, it’s hard to tell. In spite of the fact that large tech companies like Google and Facebook don’t think YOU deserve much privacy, they treat information about their data centers like state secrets. None of the major tech firms in a Greenpeace roundup fared especially well, primarily because of a lack of transparency on the part of the companies in question. But it appears big tech firms are finally making SOME kind of effort. AMD and HP are partnering to explore the potential of solar-only distributed data centers. After considerable pressure, Facebook installed solar panels at their Oregon operation earlier this year, and suggesting maybe there’s some kind of financial sense to the idea (although this is a common argument against green energy) even Standard & Poors is getting in on the action. And Apple – in spite of being such an innovative company when it comes to devices and the revenue streams attached to them, is one of the late joiners in the game. For more comprehensive roundups if you’re interested, check out this special report from DataCenterKnowledge.com or this one from EcoFriend .
Google Introduces “GMail Motion”
[ Add A Comment ]Posted on April 1, 2011 by admin in Technology
Friday, April 1st, 2011If your laptop has a built in camera, Google’s new GMail Motion adds a gestural interface to your computer, partially freeing you of the mouse and control pad.
We’ve talked a lot about the disappointing state of the user interface before; in fact we’re still a little underwhelmed by the iPad. Which is why we’re so excited about the new Gmail feature (still in beta) called GMail Motion. It adds an intuitive, gesture-based functionality to your computer, requiring only a camera, now pretty much a standard feature on laptops. We probably will continue to hem and haw about Google’s escapades, especially after the hilarious story circulating yesterday about how when Google cleaned up their content farm search spam problem, they wiped out their own content briefly, i.e. Google Places. The follow up was even funnier, when, after denying they were in bed with content farm Demand Media, Google execs partied on the Demand Media CEO’s yacht, named – no joke – The Adsense. CEO Dick Rosenblatt’s followup call was even funnier, with his “dude, don’t talk about my yacht” demand. No wonder they call it Demand Media. But we digress. This new Google Motion tool is pretty cool, you can see how it works and sign up here, or just watch the vid below.
Internet Insecurity
[ Add A Comment ]Posted on March 24, 2011 by admin in Technology
Thursday, March 24th, 2011After the recent breaches of ultimate, top-level security resources like RSA and Comodo, giving sites like Facebook twice as much info for “enhanced security” seems like a faulty strategy.
Earlier today I had an experience that reminded me that – like many of us – I should really get more on top of managing my various internet accounts and their passwords better than I do. I was trying to log in to my YouTube “Director” account, and YouTube was trying to link the account to a Google acccount. I wouldn’t have minded this, except when I tried to link the Google account and the YouTube account – which had the same username, by the way – YouTube would tell me that the account was already linked to another Google account, which it wasn’t. After twenty minutes of password resets and cookie deletions, I finally managed to log in to my own account. And then GMail suggested I add additional user information as part of Google’s interpretation of Two-factor authentication. I opted not to do so. Why? Because I simply don’t believe that either Google or Facebook (which is trying to do the same thing by asking for your phone number as part of your account verification) is enacting these programs strictly for security purposes. Both Mark Zuckerberg of Facebook and Eric Schmidt of Google are on record as saying that they don’t believe that privacy is in your future, that anonymity is intrinsically bad (Zuckerberg has hilariously said “Having two identities for yourself is an example of a lack of integrity”), and that we all need a verified identity on the web. This would make a lot of sense if you could in fact trust any web service to absolutely protect the information you gave them, but you can’t. In just the past week, two of the web’s ultimate sources of security verification – RSA and Comodo – have been hacked, a breach that Comodo’s own CEO Melih Abdulhayoglu likened to a web version of the September 11 attacks. And this of course is all hot on the tail of the well-publicized “Anonymous” attack of security firm HBGary. I’m no security expert, but I’m perfectly capable of thinking like a criminal. And my criminal mind tells me that giving twice as much information to an entity I can’t trust – i.e. any web-based service – really leaves me twice as vulnerable in the event that the entity is compromised. Which it almost certainly will be some day. I have made a casual but consistent effort to keep my online identity usefully accessible, without sharing my entire identity in one place, and will continue to do so. Common sense tells me that one-point interactions with services like Google, Facebook, banks, and other services, with a variety of e-mail accounts and varied passwords, is a decent strategy. But I think I need to ramp things up a bit. This article about password usage on Lifehacker – while screaming with irony because Lifehacker was one of the sites hacked when Anonymous went after Gawker – does hit on some key points. The author says he has 90+ accounts to manage. I’d put my number closer to 30, although if I add the accounts of clients, it may be more like 50 or 60. I’m beginning to do a bad job of managing them all, but plan to tighten things up where I can. At least I don’t use any of the 500 most common passwords. What about you? Do you trust sites like Google and Facebook with your full name, phone number, and other personal details? Or do you keep things closer to the chest?
Google Cleans Up Content Farm Search Result Spam – Finally
[ 1 Comment ]Posted on February 26, 2011 by admin in Editorial & Opinion
Saturday, February 26th, 2011After some high-profile tech industry grumbling, Google has finally tackled the problem of content farms like Demand Media. Now if they would just remove Huffington Post from their index, we’d be all set.
 I would have been even MORE pleased if the top result for “content farm” were now “Demand Media”. |
Let’s all take our hats off to Google for a moment for finally tackling the problem of their own crappy search results. If you have to do a lot of web research, you’ve probably noticed over the past few years that Google’s search results were getting spammier and spammier, thanks mostly to content farms like Demand Media, something we already belly-ached about a while back. Okay, now lets put our hats back on. Why did it take them so long to fix this? This was definitely a problem as long ago as 2006. It’s inconceivable that the Search Quality Team at Google hadn’t noticed it, and their recent fix seemed to come hot on the tails of the article by Michael Arrington on high-profile tech blog TechCrunch called Search Still Sucks , in which he said the thing many of us have thought for quite some time. So why did it take so long? The reasonable inference is that since Google’s largest revenue stream is ads, and content farms generated millions of page views with Google ad content, it would be a bit awkward to proactively blacklist them all. But that’s what Google has finally done; if you review lists like the ones at Search Engine Land and SYSTRIX, it’s immediately evident that the big losers in Google’s fix are mostly “Demand Media” sites. Which I find vaguely gratifying. If you’re not familiar with Demand Media, check out the PBS MediaShift series about companies like theirs. One of the most telling things about Demand Media is simply who the CEO is. While one has to acknowledge the drive and accomplishments of Richard Rosenblatt, about the only positive thing I can say about a guy who developed a company like MySpace is that he then managed to screw Rupert Murdoch by selling it to him for over half a billion dollars. In creating Demand Media, he’s shown that while he has incredibly savvy, drive, and management skills, he’s either entirely driven by the bottom line at the expense of any benefit to the human race, or utterly delusional. In this Business Insider piece about how Google’s algorithm change “hasn’t hurt their business at all” his EVP of Media and Ops says “We have built our business by focusing on creating the useful and original content that meets the specific needs of today’s consumer“. Yes Demand Media. I’m sure today’s consumer has been clamoring for more crap content to dig through to find any actual useful information. And while my greatest complaint about Google remains more about what I’d call their “imperial overreach” – in that their near-total domination as a portal to the web is the worst thing that’s happened to search in its relatively short history – we still have to give them an incredible amount of respect. The fact that you can dip into a global library of information and extract relevant information in seconds with relative ease borders on mystical. The unfortunate thing is that if we’re using a library as the analogy here, I think we now have the problem that everyone in the world is going to try to shove their book onto the shelves, and there are no librarians on duty, just an algorithm and an advertising department. A friend asked me the other day what I thought the solution to Google’s search problem was, and I said something I’ve said for several years when answering the question: “human edited content“. While the Open Directory Project (which was based on this concept) bit the dust ages ago from internal “link whoring” corruption, it doesn’t mean that the idea won’t work. Wikipedia is a great example of fairly reliable human-edited content. Why couldn’t this work with search? In any case, although I’m suspicious – as others are – of the continued presence of crap eHow.com content in results, I’m already relieved to see fewer “HubPages.com” and “Examiner” results. I just wonder if they’re going to fix that “bookmark site that links to a blog post that links to an article on HuffPo that steals an article wholesale from another site” problem.
Facebook To Demand DNA Sample For Log In
[ Add A Comment ]Posted on January 5, 2011 by admin in Technology
Wednesday, January 5th, 2011In addition to the blood of your firstborn, a retinal scan, and other biometric methods. Do you trust Facebook to be the issuer of your “Internet Driver’s License”?
Sometimes I feel like I’m Charlton Heston’s character in Soylent Green
