newsonaut
Turning inner space into outer space
Saturday, December 19, 2015
What's in a dot-name? Plenty
If you’re starting up a website, it’s tough to come up with a name because all the good ones have been taken. That’s especially the case if you limit yourself to names ending in dot-com.
And many of the other well-known endings — dot-net and dot-org — have also been snapped up. To get around that, some sites are using endings normally reserved for countries.
The British Indian Ocean territory, an archipelago south of India, is in demand among tech websites. That’s because dot-io not only stands for Indian Ocean but also input/output — the communication that takes place between computing devices.
The Pacific Ocean country of Tuvalu is in a similar situation. Sites specializing in television buy a domain from the island’s government so they can have dot-tv in their name.
Sometimes, a country’s letters are tacked on to spell out a whole word. Libya was popular for awhile because dot-ly could be used in combinations such as bit.ly — a site specializing in shortening web addresses.
That trend may soon become a thing of the past with the flood of new endings now available. When you go to register a name for your site, you’ll find that there is a dot word for just about anything you can think of.
Some new ones coming up include dot-car, dot-family, dot-theatre, dot-protection, dot-wine and dot-cloud.
It might seem like a recipe for mayhem, but I’ve seen some of the new names used in ways that actually make sense. Symbol.guide, for example, is a guide to the code needed on websites for special characters such as ampersands.
When dot-news came out, I thought it might become wide spread. So far, it seems to be used mainly by people who want to reserve it. Were you thinking about starting up kamloops.news? Too bad — it’s taken.
A particularly contentious one is dot-sucks. The idea behind it (or so they say) is to keep corporations and brands on their toes. More commonly, though, it seems to be used as a way to extort money from those same corporations and brands. If they don’t pay for a dot-sucks address, they run the risk of someone else doing it.
This is what happened to Air Canada. They didn’t buy aircanada.sucks, and now they’re paying the price.
The site is supposedly a place for Air Canada customers to share their horror stories with the hope of improving service. But as of this writing, there was not one shared story. Instead, there were plenty of stories pulled in automatically from other sources via news feeds.
Plus, there is a store where you can buy gadgets to make your flight better.
I’m guessing the owners hope Air Canada will sit up, take notice, and make an offer to buy the site. It’s hard to believe they expect to make money from the store.
Of course, Air Canada could simply counter with one of their own called aircanada.rocks. Yes, that possibility also exists.
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Saturday, November 28, 2015
Google shouldn't take our trust for granted
Google has become so dominant that we often don’t even talk about searching any more. We google it.
Worldwide, Google’s search engine market share is estimated at around 90 per cent. It makes you wonder why Bing and Yahoo even bother trying.
But the trouble with a having near monopoly on a service is that there is always the temptation to abuse that position. This happened recently when Google changed its search results so that its own products ranked higher than those of competitors.
When looking at search results, people tend to believe that the closer the result is to the top, the better it must be. And generally speaking that’s the way it’s supposed to be.
So if you do a search on “restaurant reviews,” then it is fair to expect that the best ones are at the top. I tried this search with Google and got results from TripAdvisor and Yelp. That seems about right. These are both popular sites for restaurant reviews, and you would expect them to have enough reviews to make a visit to them worthwhile.
Now, apparently Google Plus has a similar service that you’ve probably never heard of. Google Plus has never reached mainstream popularity, and could use a little help with promotion. And what better way to do this than with search results.
That’s what happened last weekend. Suddenly, the most “popular” place to find reviews was with Google Plus. TripAdvisor and Yelp were buried.
Google claims it was a mistake and that things are now back to normal. But just a few days of this “error” cost Yelp millions of dollars.
“Far from a glitch, this is a pattern of behavior by Google,” said its CEO Jeremy Stoppelman.
This kind of goosing of the rankings is so obvious that Google was bound to get called on it. But it makes me wonder if they’re also doing it in more subtle ways that fly under the radar. If this company, with so much power, is to maintain any kind of credibility, it needs our trust.
Take privacy, for instance. It’s fairly well know by now that when we use Google’s services — search, email, docs, maps, etc. — we’re paying by giving up a little bit of our privacy. Everything we do is logged and aggregated to help them sell advertising.
As long as we know we’re making this deal, it seems fair. After all, Google does offer some excellent services, so why not take advantage of them.
I just wish they would be more transparent about it.
For example, recently when clicking on Google search results, I found it took a long time for the websites to load. It got so bad that the web browser timed out — essentially gave up trying.
The reason for this might be the incredibly long web addresses you get in Google’s search results. Try right-clicking on one of the results and choose Copy URL (or something similar), then paste this into a text editor.
What you’ll get is something like this: https://www.google.ca/url? plus a string of gobbledygook that only the most dedicated computer programmer could love. In the midst of it all will be something familiar: the actual web address that you were looking for.
Search “food network” in Google and look at the mess you get. Try the same search in a competing search engine called Duck Duck Go and you get this, plain and simple:
http://www.foodnetwork.com/
So what’s the deal?
Google is not content to merely present you with a list of search results. It wants to know which one you clicked on. So instead of going directly to the website of your choice, you first have to make a little side trip to Google’s servers.
Normally, this happens so quickly that you don’t even notice it. But it’s something to keep in mind if you’re thinking that your computer or the Internet is slow. It might be Google’s fault.
Lately I’ve been trying out Duck Duck Go. This is a fairly new service that promises complete privacy — no tracking of any kind. Their results are good and getting better, plus they take you directly to the websites.
On the other hand, my Google result for “food network” was better in the sense that it gave me the Canadian (.ca) version of this website, while Duck Duck Go gave me the U.S. (.com) version. Google can track your location, right down to the city. And this helps provide more relevant results. In some ways this is good thing and in some ways it’s creepy. Duck Duck Go won’t automatically track your location, but you can use its settings to let it know what country you live in.
I just wish they would tell us in plain, open language what exactly is going on. The explanation needs to be up-front where everyone can see and understand it.
More posts in the Internet category
Saturday, October 17, 2015
Yahoo may have just taken the first step toward vanquishing passwords
Over the years, I’ve accumulated dozens, perhaps hundreds, of passwords. Most of them I keep stored in an app, which itself requires a password. Scrolling through the list there are passwords for things that have been long forgotten.
For example, it looks like I at one time decided to sign up for the MacCentral discussion forum. MacCentral was at one time a popular website for Mac users. It no long exists — hasn’t for years.
I could delete some of those old passwords, but it wouldn’t do much good — at least not in terms of bringing down the total. It seems like everything you want to do on the Internet requires a password of some sort.
I’ve been looking at the possibility of using a service for an embedded calendar of events. There are a number of options out there, but it’s hard to decide if they’re any good unless you create an account and give them a try.
So that’s a bunch more passwords.
Every once in a while there is a glimmer of hope that passwords are becoming a thing of the past. As far as I’m concerned, it can’t happen soon enough. I try to keep all my passwords in a safe place, but sometimes I forget, and frustration ensues when I can’t remember one of them.
The latest assault on passwords comes from Yahoo Mail. They’ve just rolled out a system that allows you to securely log in to their service without a password. You read that right — NO PASSWORD.
Here’s how it works: you download the Yahoo Mail app to your smartphone and set it up so that it receives a notification when you want to sign in to Yahoo Mail. If you tap “Yes” then you’re in.
My first reaction was that it would be quicker and easier to type in a password, assuming you remember it. Also, even now, not everyone has a smartphone on them all the time.
Still, when you think about, this is a far more secure way of doing things. Thieves love Internet-based security systems because you can eventually crack them. Set up computers to hack away millions of times a day, and you’re bound to get lucky.
But using Yahoo’s new system would make that approach impossible. That’s because the only password (the one you use to set up the app) is on your phone. Communication between the app and Yahoo Mail is by random tokens that are impossible to guess.
That means the thief would pretty much have to come to your house and steal your phone in order to get into your Yahoo account. Even then, of course, he would need to get past whatever password or fingerprint technology you have used to secure the phone.
This, of course, would be a major inconvenience for bad guys. Balance this with the small inconvenience of tapping a “Yes” when you want to log in and you come out ahead.
I tried it out myself and found it a little weird, but I could get used to it. Once I had everything set up on the app on my iPhone, I tried using Yahoo Mail on a computer. I received a text message asking for permission to log in. I swiped to the left and found the options. I tapped “Yes” then waited.
Not really knowing what to expect, it seemed like it wasn’t working. But after a few seconds, I was in. Impressive. The down side is that I discovered I have over a hundred unread emails, but that’s a whole other thing.
I suspect that if Yahoo’s system catches on with Apple, Google and the rest, it will become further refined, more intuitive and easier to use. When that day arrives, passwords may finally become a thing of the past. I can hardly wait.
(Glenn Fleishman, a respected writer for Macworld, outlines how the new Yahoo Mail system works. Well worth a read.)
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Sunday, September 27, 2015
Reminder: Safari's Reader has been making ads disappear for years
With all the fuss lately about ad blockers in the latest version of iOS, don’t forget that both mobile and desktop Safari have long had a built-in way of clearing the clutter — Reader.
Have a look at these screenshots from The Next Web:
If you tap on the icon to the left of the web address, it reverses colour and produces a version of the article with nothing but easy-to-read text.
You can go a step further and tap the icon to the right when you’re in Reader mode. This gives you options for text size, background colour, text colour and font.
It’s also guilt-free. Your visit to the website still counts as a “view” for the ads, and the publisher continues to get revenue for it.
Reader doesn’t block tracking, but you can turn on that option in your Safari settings.
The big downside is that Reader doesn’t actually speed up page load times because it’s only hiding ads, not blocking them.
Still, it’s a good option for those who feel uneasy about using blockers.
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Saturday, September 26, 2015
Internet for all a worthy goal in effort to end world poverty
Most people in emerging and developing countries see the Internet as a good thing when it comes to education and the economy. And so do giants of our technological age such as Mark Zuckerberg and Bill Gates.
Zuckerberg, the CEO of Facebook, spoke at the United Nations on Saturday to issue a call for universal Internet access. In addition to the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, he is supported by Bono, Richard Branson, Arianna Huffington, Shakira, George Takei, Charlize Theron and Jimmy Wales.
By giving people access to the tools, knowledge and opportunities of the Internet, we can give a voice to the voiceless and power to the powerless. We also know that the internet is a vital enabler of jobs, growth and opportunity. And research tells us that for every 10 people connected to the Internet, about one is lifted out of poverty.
Facebook created Internet.org, a service that provides free access to the Internet. After complaints about limitations, Facebook has rebranded its effort as Free Basics and made it more flexible for third-party developers to join in.
In countries where data is expensive and money to pay for it is scarce, this seems like a good deal. Limited access is better than none.
“If someone can’t afford to pay for connectivity, it is always better to have some access than none at all,” Zuckerberg says.
With one billion people already using Facebook every day, cynics might say this is a scheme to add another billion. Maybe. But Zuckerberg has plenty of company to keep him honest.
For example, Facebook is one of the signatories to Connect the World, an online petition you can sign to support Internet for all. It promotes one of 17 Global Goals for Sustainable Development.
It’s easy to be cynical about the Internet. As a reflection of humanity, it definitely has a dark side. But for most people in the world, the Internet is seen as a way of pulling themselves out of poverty. And that’s something worth getting behind.
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Saturday, August 22, 2015
The Ashley Madison affair: Don't trust the Internet to cover up for you
The lesson to be learned from the Ashley Madison debacle is this: If there is something you wouldn’t do in real life — because it’s embarrassing, immoral, dangerous or whatever — don’t think you can get away with doing it on the Internet.
The thousands who signed up with Ashley Madison so they could cheat on their wives or husbands are learning this hard truth after hackers broke into the site’s servers and dumped the files on the Internet where anyone with a little search savvy can find them.
Ashley Madison is quick to point out that the real criminals are the hackers, who call themselves the Impact Team. Its customers, they add, are not breaking any laws.
That may be true, but the site does promise anonymity, suggesting that people who use the service fear some kind of consequence if they are found out. In fact, this desire for anonymity is so strong that Ashley Madison was offering to permanently erase members’ files for an extra fee.
Some might call this a form of blackmail. According to interviews with the hackers, many people paid the extra fee, but the company never (for reasons that are not clear) followed through.
This is the situation that prompted the Impact Team to act.
I imagine there are suspicious wives and husbands all over North America sifting through the data dump to see whether their spouse is a member. We may even see a spike in the divorce rate.
Already, the Canadian Press has found credit card data attached to computers at the Department of National Defence and the House of Commons. No doubt, workers from all political parties are busy checking the backgrounds of their candidates. Cheating may be legal, but there are great swathes of the electorate who would never vote for a cheater.
The Impact Team, which appears to be made up of former employees, released a statement saying that the site contains thousands of fake female profiles and that 90 to 95 per cent of users are men: “Chances are your man signed up on the world’s biggest affair site, but never had one. If that distinction matters.”
Of course, in many cases that distinction won’t matter — marriages and careers will be ruined.
Robin Williams summed it up best: “The problem is that God gives men a brain and a penis, and only enough blood to run one at a time.”
Whole industries have taken advantage of this.
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Saturday, July 18, 2015
Online forums could learn from apartment building managers
Years ago, when I lived in an apartment building, I was awakened in the middle of the night by someone playing loud music.
I mentioned this to the manager, and he said he would look into it. The next day, he told me that the tenant who disturbed me was being evicted.
I thought this was pretty harsh for one minor incident, and told him so. But his answer was a good one, and it has stuck with me to this day: If you don’t get rid of the bad tenants, then the good ones will leave and you’ll have nothing left but bad tenants.
Employees tasked with running online forums or policing website comment sections know all too well how true this is. If you don’t weed out the trolls and spammers, everyone else shies away and you’re left with a toxic stew not worth saving.
I was reminded of that when I read about Reddit’s solution for its forums devoted to racism and misogyny: don’t ban them, just hide them. So CoonTown and its ilk are thriving with more members than ever, emboldened by tacit approval from Reddit management.
Supposedly, they’ll be harder to find, but if you know what you’re looking for, a search engine will have no trouble ferreting them out.
So what would Reddit look like if it were an apartment building? Maybe the downstairs suites would be blocked off with doors that didn’t have signs on them. You could go down there, but likely wouldn’t because of the thought of it would make your skin crawl.
It sounds like a horror movie: the house with the basement and the horrible crimes that were committed there. I just finished reading a book where one of the characters was accidentally exposed to a movie like that as a baby, and suffered from nightmares well into adulthood.
Sometimes I fear that much of the Internet suffers from the Reddit syndrome. Loud-mouthed louts shout everyone else down, and the promise of open discourse becomes a shattered dream.
I’ve talked to many people who already avoid social media because they don’t want to expose themselves to negativity. To me, their fears seem overblown. Still, the same could be said of neighbourhoods that have bad reputations. They may in fact be not so bad once you get to know them — but perceptions are hard to change once they become established.
I’ve taken jabs at Facebook for its computer algorithms that promote happy-face news. You can see why they do it, though. Facebook is the apartment building where middle-class tenants feel safe, and more keep moving in all the time.
There are some great forums in Reddit that attempt to be helpful. If Reddit turns into a tenement, those are be the parts that will missed.
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Saturday, February 21, 2015
There are limits to Internet usage, and you may have to pay for exceeding them
If you thought you could save money by cutting the cable and switching to Netflix, there’s bad news — Telus has figured out a way to grab some of that money back.
You may be surprised to learn that your Internet plan has something called a bandwidth limit. This means you’re only allowed to download and upload so much stuff each month. The more you pay, the more you’re allowed.
If you’ve never heard of such a thing, it’s probably because even though bandwidth limits exist, they are seldom enforced. Generally speaking, Internet service providers turn a blind eye if you go a few gigabytes over the limit.
But Telus has decided to change that. If you go over the limit in your plan, they will charge you $5 for a “bucket” of 50GB. After that, the buckets cost $10 each to a maximum of $75.
They say that most people won’t be affected because they are already on an appropriate plan that keeps them safely below the limit. But looking at the data plans available from Telus, I’m not so sure.
Telus Internet 6, also known as High Speed, High Speed Enhanced and High Speed Extreme, has a monthly limit of 100 GB. According to this helpful explainer from Shaw, you can burn through 42 GB by watching just three two-hour HD movies a week on Netflix. For a cable cutter, this wouldn’t be at all unreasonable.
The Vancouver Sun notes that gamers will also be affected.
The new charge means online gamers will need to keep a close eye on their data usage. Most of the downloadable games for the new generation of consoles — Xbox One and PlayStation 4 — are in excess of 25 GB each.
As you can imagine, some Telus customers are not happy. According to the CBC, some are saying the new charges violate the concept of net neutrality.
They point out that watching Optik TV does not count as data even though it streams through the same fibre optic network as the Internet.
With net neutrality, all data should be treated equally, and customers should not be charged more for certain types of data. Telus could be seen as violating this principle by charging more for Netflix usage but not for its own Optik TV service.
The Canadian Radio-television and Telecommunications Commission (CRTC) has guidelines that side with net neutrality, but generally leaves it up to consumers to complain before taking action.
All eyes are now on other Internet service providers. Will they go for a boost in revenue by following the lead of Telus? Or will they differentiate themselves as the good guys who don’t charge more — potentially bringing in customers who have switched away from Telus?
Of course, if the switchers turn out to be a bunch of bandwidth hogs, as Telus claims, they may not exactly be welcome.
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Saturday, January 17, 2015
A ring of satellites will cover Earth — and Mars — with Internet
Anyone living in a remote area, wondering if they will ever have good Internet service, should get to know Elon Musk. He has a plan that would not only bring speed-of-light Internet to every corner of the world, but also to colonies on Mars.
Details are a little sketchy at this point, but the plan involves satellites and $20 billion.
If you’ve never heard of Musk, you’re probably thinking this is a pipe dream. If you know anything at all about him, you’re thinking it’s only a matter of time before he makes it happen.
Musk made his fortune with PayPal and has since moved on to start up Tesla Motors, which has made a success of designing, manufacturing and selling electric cars. He heads a space transport services company called SpaceX, which is making rockets to supply the International Space Station. And he’s working on a high-speed transportation system known as the Hyperloop, which would allow passengers to make the 570-kilometre trip from Los Angeles to San Francisco in 35 minutes.
The Canadian-American entrepreneur, born in South Africa, has a way of turning science fiction into reality.
He reminds me of another man who dreams big — English businessman Richard Branson, who also believes in satellite Internet.
The Los Angeles Times has a good explanation of how the idea would work. Much hinges on cutting edge technology that is making satellites small enough that they can be built for about $350,000 each on an assembly line. That would be a big saving from the current process where satellites cost millions of dollars, weigh tons and take several years to build.
Branson is investing in a venture called OneWeb Ltd., which plans worldwide Internet service that would use 648 of these small satellites. Musk has the same idea, with a proposal to create what he calls micro-satellites. He hasn’t announced any involvement with OneWeb, but he has already shown that he can greatly reduce the cost of a rocket. It doesn’t take much imagination to see the benefits of Musk and OneWeb working together.
According to the L.A. Times:
More than half of the world’s population lacks Internet access, according to the International Telecommunications Union, an agency of the United Nations. And the success of a satellite venture providing Internet access at a fraction of the price would have broad implications, especially for the poor living in remote locations.
Science fiction sometimes brings us utopian visions of the future where everyone in the world lives in luxury. As it stands, this would be impossible. There simply aren’t enough resources.
But there is no shortage of innovation. It’s still possible to take our current resources and use them more efficiently so that everyone benefits. A powerful Internet reaching every nook and cranny of the globe won’t produce a world of opulence, but it would certainly level the communications playing field.
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Friday, December 26, 2014
The Internet has a way of getting us to believe the unbelievable
As Internet hoaxes go, the woman who claimed to have three breasts was brilliant.
It was crazy enough that you couldn’t help but be curious, but not so crazy that it was totally inconceivable.
Alisha Hessler declared, back in September, that she spent $20,000 on surgery and consulted dozens of doctors in the process.
“I got it because I wanted to make myself unattractive to men. Because I don’t want to date anymore,” she told a radio station.
That’s an interesting take, given that the three-breasted mutant prostitute in 1990’s Total Recall was considered to be extra-sexy. The scene where she flashes her wares was reprised in the 2012 remake.
Anyway, Hessler — also known as Jasmine Tridevil — hoped her ploy would land a reality TV show, which doesn’t seem so far-fetched these days. And the idea of getting an extra implant? Well, there’s all kinds of surgery going on that would have been unimaginable 10 years ago.
So it was almost disappointing when the third boob turned out to be no more real than the bumps on Worf’s head. Still, we may not have heard the last of Ms. Hessler. She is apparently pursuing a singing career.
Hessler’s ruse has the dubious honour of being named the number one hoax of 2014 by the Washington Post. The 15-item list includes a number of gems, including another of my favourites — just for the sheer audacity of it — the parents who claimed they were kicked out of a KFC restaurant in Mississippi because the disfigured face of their young daughter was bothering the other patrons.
It turns out they weren’t even in the restaurant at the time they claimed to be. On the other hand, their daughter’s face really had been disfigured when she was mauled by pit bulls. Kind-hearted people overlooked the deceit of the girl’s parents and donated more than $100,000 for restorative surgery.
Hoaxes seem to work best when they align with our sometimes-warped preconceptions of the way the world really is. It’s not that much of a stretch to believe reality TV shows have got so out of hand that there might be one in the works about a woman with three breasts.
And when it comes to children, our society (thankfully) has an innate desire to rush to their defence wherever there is perceived injustice.
Expect more Internet hoaxes in 2015 as the line between truth and fiction continues to blur. You can keep on top of them by visiting Emergent — a website devoted to making sure that line doesn’t get too blurry.
Even now, there are stories circulating about a passenger being escorted off an American Airlines flight after he became angry over being repeatedly wished a Merry Christmas by the crew. It fits in nicely with the “war on Christmas” theme that gets people riled up, but there is no evidence to support it other than an unsourced brief in the New York Post.
And is it any stranger than the story about the guy who wound up in the hospital after winning an egg nog chugging contest in 12 seconds? That one was indeed true.
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