Google's Fails and Successes

Even big companies fail.  Earlier this year Google came out with Buzz, a product that introduced Google to social media.  It failed epically; it didn’t have the success Google expected.  One of the obvious reasons why Buzz failed is because at the time of its roll-out, Google didn’t take sufficient account of privacy concerns and was widely criticized for this. Google took advantage of their user base on Gmail and made Buzz available from the Gmail inbox. The problem is that by default, Google Buzz publicly disclosed a list of the names of Gmail contacts the user most frequently emailed or chatted with. The flaw has since been fixed, but Buzz has lost a lot of users and gained a bad reputation.  Google’s capabilities and huge user base defined its disabilities.  They are able to reach a huge amount of people when a product is rolled out, but If there is something wrong with the product, the consequences can be detrimental.
Another reason why Buzz failed is that it offered something that most users didn’t need or didn’t want.  A similar service already existed through Twitter, a microblogging service that allows users to send and receive messages.  Although a fail, we can learn from Buzz and Google’s way to manage their company.  To develop Buzz, Google created a small group, a somewhat independent organization, which could focus on the product. An advantage of having a small group is that the group can get excited about the possibilities of what they are developing and that they don’t see themselves as a small part of the corporation, where their effort is diminished or given lower priority by other products. Another advantage of this is that the whole company didn’t have to focus on Buzz, in case they had to pull the plug, it would be relatively easily.  We can see this when Google Wave, a web-based platform and communication protocol, didn’t meet Google’s expectations and was terminated before the product made it out of beta.
Leaving Buzz and Wave behind, a reason why Google is so powerful and successful is that their products are simple, and offer what their users need.  Google is not controlled by the owners, but by the investors, the users and the developers.  One example of this is Gmail’s introduction of nested folders (or hierarchical labels).  For years other email services provided a way to organize your emails through hierarchical folders just like you would organize your files on Windows or any other operating system.  Gmail introduced the feature of labels, a more convenient way to organizing your email.  Many users, coming from other services, demanded the ability to have nested labels so Google worked on it and it now offers such feature.  A company directed by its users and developers is a successful company. Google will keep being successful as they listen to their users and don’t lose or abuse their trust.

The technology and media in our lives

Just this week I was talking to a friend about the secretary at his work place.  She has an online relationship with a guy that lives miles away from her.  Although she calls him her boyfriend, their relationship is far from being a “regular” relationship.  Online interactions with other people could seem to fulfil our own needs, but it is likely that they are just deceiving us.  These relationships lack the fidelity of relationships developed in real life, with personal interaction.  We must be careful that the time we spend online, or on video games, and the things we do there don’t inhibit us from receiving the blessings from spending our time on something more productive.  While these activities are not inherently bad, it is when we put them as our first priority and stop doing the things that matter most that we are in trouble.  As Elder David A. Bednar suggested, we have to make sure that the use of the various technologies and media invite rather than impede the companionship of the Holy Ghost and that the time we spend with them don’t restrict our capacity to live, love and serve in meaningful ways.

Children and the Internet

There are many parents who don’t take their children to school because there are bad kids there.  Over-protectiveness is not a good reason to keep your children home all the time.  Children need to go to school and they need to be taught how to deal with those kids who are bullies. They will find themselves in uncomfortable situations, but there will be opportunities to teach and to learn.  In the same way, you need to teach children how to deal with technology, especially the Internet.  Sadly, you can’t always be with your children to guide and protect them, but you can teach them correct principles. The prophet Joseph Smith taught, “teach them correct principles and let them govern themselves”.  Not letting them surf the Internet at home doesn’t prevent or guard your children against the experiences that they will have surfing the Internet at school or at a friend’s house.  It is better to give them the opportunity to learn at home, where you can supervise them (looking at the browsing history, setting up filters, etc) than expecting them to do the right thing without having first talked about it or set down guidelines. There are a lot of things that you as a parent can do at home to teach and control your children’s use of the Internet.  A great guide to do this is the Internet Safety Project where you can find podcasts (audio/video broadcasts) on the subject, a wiki that includes tutorials on how to keep your kids safe from the dangers of the Internet and other useful information.  It is better to prepare your children now than trying to correct and teach them what to do later.

Open Source Advantages

Microsoft produces the most popular operating system for business and home computers.  Their release cycles vary from release to release.  While some releases are really popular, others are completely ignored (Windows Me and Windows Vista).  On the other hand, Ubuntu, a Linux distribution sponsored by Canonical Ltd., have release cycles every six months.  A lot of Ubuntu users are former Windows users who have migrated to Linux because it offers what they need in a more stable platform.  One of the advantages of Ubuntu is that is released under a GNU license where users have access to the code.  Windows is famous for being buggy and is known for being slow to patch bugs or updating new features.  During the last release of Windows (Windows 7), Microsoft launched a public beta program where they received a lot of feedback.  While this helped them get rid of lots of bugs, it is nothing compared to the testing system offered by a software where the code is openly available.  Ubuntu users don’t only report obvious bugs, but they are also able to find bugs that can only be found because the code is available.  These users act not only as testers, but also as debuggers: two roles that are strictly separated on closed platforms like Microsoft’s.  Another advantage of open-source software over closed platforms is that the software available is closely related to people’s ideas and needs.  Users start their own projects and are later joined by many other users, with different levels of experience, across the globe. On the other hand, Microsoft has to conduct studies and surveys to better understand the actual needs of the users.  Again, their last beta release helped them a lot this time, but is it enough? As open-source operating systems like Ubuntu become more popular, Microsoft will have more trouble staying up to date in offering what users need most. Microsoft has an advantage with the number of users, but how long can they keep them happy?

Organizing with Technology

Last week Google introduced a new site called Boutiques.  It targets people who buy clothes online. It allows you create your own curated boutique or follow a collection of boutiques curated by celebrities, stylists, designers and fashion bloggers.  Why would you want to create your own boutique? It gives you an opportunity to give other people a sense of your style and teach them about your taste.  People can follow you and expect you to update the content of your boutique.  You have the ability to display your expertise or talent. The number of followers you get could turn into something competitive for some people. You might get more followers if you are recognized by other users as a person with good taste and style, but one that is also frugal.  All this is something that new technology allows us to do.

Technology has removed obstacles that otherwise would stop us from interacting with other people.  It let us take collective action and achieve results that we couldn’t have before.  It has opened the doors for a lot of opportunities.  It let us become producers.  We have never been able to share, coordinate or act in the ways we can now.  This also increases our freedom.  For example, decades ago we had to pay for an Operating System and other software that didn’t always meet our needs or expectations.  Thanks to new technology, masses of people can collaborate together and come up with something that meets their needs.  This is how we now have many distributions of Linux, a free operating system that meets the needs and expectations of many users.  People can contribute to these kinds of projects, but if they don’t contribute they don’t get penalized either. Technology lets us move as a group and receive the benefits of a group without the effort needed years ago.

Years ago I used to participate at help.com, what used to be an online helpdesk by CNet.  People would go there and post all kind of questions related to technology and computers.  You were ranked according to the number of questions you answered.  It provided an opportunity to publicly display your knowledge and created a motivation to answer in public.  Every week it displayed the top-ten contributors on the home-page and my goal was to be on that list, public to the world.  People saved money and time by not having to go to an expert. The same kind of idea has evolved to online forums with more complex, but more effective systems that keep promoting the participation of ordinary people.  Just over the last couple of years I have saved hundreds of dollars (literally) by going to a forum and ask about my car’s problems.  Going to the dealer would require at least a couple of hundred dollars every visit.  This is an incentive for people like me to visit these forums.  Having saved this money has also motivated me, and the rest of the users, to keep participating.  When people ask about the same problems I’ve had, I’m more than willing to help them.  To help these other people, we don’t have to go out of our homes, we don’t have to pay a membership, no one has to spend time organizing the community and telling us what to do or not to do, it is a powerful way to get what we look for.  This is the power of organizing without organization as Clay Shirky puts it.  Technology makes it much easier.

Demanding a More Secure Web

A few weeks ago Eric Butler, a software developer based in Washington, released a free open source Firefox extension that allows the user to hijack other users’ sessions that are on the same wireless network.  When you sit down at a public place and use Facebook or any other social network over a public hotspot, the site sends a cookie (a file with information that identifies you as you) and stores it to your computer.  Another person on the same wireless network could use the extension, called Firesheep, and hijack your session pretending to be you on Facebook or whichever other sites you are logged on to.  This is a widely known problem that has been talked about over and over again, but websites continue to fail at protecting their users.  Many sites use HTTPS to log users in but then return the user to unsecure connections to serve the rest of the their pages.  An easy fix for this problem is to encrypt the network using WEP/WPA, but the extension’s developer is trying to make us aware of how vulnerable sites not using HTTPS are.  He writes “they’ve been ignoring this responsibility for too long, and it’s time for everyone to demand a more secure web. My hope is that Firesheep will help the users win.”  At the end we can expect sites to start using HTTPS over HTTP, instead of users having to change the wireless encryption or manually adding extensions that are supposed to force HTTPS , but that are not always reliable.  An interesting fact is that HTTPS does not produce an overhead on the sites’ servers, which is the reason many companies decide not to offer HTTPS.  HTTPS requires an initial handshake which can be somewhat slow, but the actual amount of data transferred as part of the handshake is about only 5kB. This can be a burden for small requests, but with the high speed internet that we have access to it doesn’t mean much.  Look at gmail, it’s been using HTTPS since January (before it was an option) and the access speed is not slow at all.  Hopefully the message sent by Eric Butler will catch on and companies will start protecting their users’ data using HTTPS.  It is time that we the users who control the internet demand security on the services we depend on.

Enforcing Copyright Laws: A Huge Challenge

One of the challenges about copyright laws is that the new generation is growing up thinking that they don’t have to pay for music or other intangible products.  They will pay for clothes and food, but won’t pay for music.
I remember reading an article in the Ensign magazine a couple of years ago.  In the article the author suggested to not distribute music illegally, and to be careful about copyright laws, among other things.  I remember sending the link to the article to one of my friends in a country where piracy is common.  He said that he did not want to read the article because he knew that he was not willing to follow the counsel given there.  That is just how he was brought up; that is how the new generation is brought up.
Companies can sue and go after companies and individuals, but they will not be able to shut down the network or the technology where file sharing operates.  The most effective way to solve this problem of infringement of copyright laws is trying to change how people think.  Just how you can say “no” to someone that is offering you a drug, you can say “no” to someone offering to copy copyright material for you.

Civil Disobedience in the Digital Era

Civil disobedience, as defined by Wikipedia, "argues that people should not permit government to overrule or atrophy their consciences, and that people have a duty to avoid allowing such acquiescence to enable the government to make them the agents of injustice".  One of the greatest examples of the benefits of civil disobedience is Gandhi’s campaign for independence from the British Empire.  Like the civil protests that we all have a right to, hacking can be seen as civil disobedience when it shows discontent and opposition, and it ultimately shows a way of doing things better. What are the benefits of hacking?  One benefit of our disobedience is that it gives us more options.  When the iPhone first came out, the options to customize it or doing other productive things, like reading PDF files, or just changing the background, was limited or inexistent.  The hacking community created applications and modified the OS so that we could change those settings and add functionality to the phone, functionality that was already available on other phones.  What did Apple do? They came up with their own implementation of the features introduced by the hacking community, i.e. we now have multi-tasking, we can change wallpapers, will be able to change sms ringtones soon, etc. As someone puts it "we need to keep on hacking so long as we're angry, frustrated, and dissatisfied with the status quo.  We can sit around and complain, or we can do better." It should be a pretty easy choice and as long as someone is willing to "disobey" we all will enjoy the benefits that come with it.

"...in us and our seed all generations after us should be blessed"

President Woodruff said: “The eyes of God and all the holy prophets are watching us. This is the great dispensation that has been spoken of ever since the world began.” We live in the dispensation of the fullness of times, indeed, and all the blessings that our ancestors had are available to us.  It is our turn to be grateful for this blessing and to be faithful on helping fulfill the prophecy and bless all generations; the technology available to us helps us speed the process. I remember when my dad used to look at microfilms to extract information to do the work for our ancestors. Years later he started using FamilySearch and his work became much easier.  He found out that he had duplicated the work for a few people, something that with FamilySearch would hardly happen.  And now with the New Family Search the work is a lot easier. I just had to log in and link to my dad to be able to see all my ancestors for whom he has done the work for. He recently found out that there was a man, thousands of miles away from our home, that is also doing the work for his family. He didn't know the man, and he doesn't know if they're related, but they're both working on their families.  What a wonderful blessing it is to have the technology we have and be able to contribute to the Lord's work.  What a blessing it is to live in this last dispensation.

"...in us and our seed all generations after us should be blessed".

Cyber Attacks and the Cyber Space

Most of us have probably visited a web site that has been down due to a DoS (denial-of-service) attack, but were not aware of the cause for the site being down.  These kinds of attacks are an attempt to make an internet site or service not function as designed. The average internet user has little idea of what's happening behind the screen in being able to communicate with someone on the other side of the world. The knowledge of the average user decreases when we address the threats and security implications of having a network as open as the internet.

One or two decades ago, even an advanced user was little aware of all the holes that are open for people to take over a system. We have come a long way as the Pentagon's Cyber Command was scheduled to be up and running this month. Even though it missed the deadline to be fully operational, we can see that the government is aware of the need for an agency such as this one.  Interestingly enough, the Pentagon's Cyber Command missed the deadline because it was struggling to fill out the rest of the organization which needs more than 1,000 employees.

Even with this new Cyber Command, the rest of the U.S. government is lagging behind, debating the responsibilities of different agencies.  We have heard this before; It might be understandable as many people don't see or understand the tangible consequences of a cyber attack until they experience it firsthand. It would be interesting to know how much authority the Pentagon has to help fend off cyber attacks within the U.S.

An article recently reported that more than 100 countries are currently trying to break into U.S. networks. China and Russia are home of the greatest concentration of attacks. Attacks between different countries have been increasing recently as they are attempting to take down each other’s websites with DoS attacks. Many of the victims are government websites, but many victims also belong to the private sector.  How will the government respond to a call of aid due to an attack on the private sector? Does the Cyber Command have the authority to respond to it?

Government agencies have to catch up with the threats that Cyber Space presents, and they have to come up with a proper response model adaptable to the civilian and private sector. Meanwhile the other countries or organizations, like the U.N., could also have the initiative to help limit and punish cyber attacks. Cyber space and cyber attacks are real.

Women and Science

About a year ago I took a Sociology class at Brigham Young University. The main topic in that class was inequality and for a week we discussed gender inequality. Someone brought up the point that there are majors at school where the majority of the students are females and there are other majors where there are almost no females. The professor gave a few ideas, while the discussion leaned towards The Family: A Proclamation to the World. He asked the ladies in the class to give their opinion. Most of them, if not all, were Mormons. Most of them agreed that the reason they chose to study Nursing, Family Science or similar majors was because those majors would help them to better prepare to be mothers. Another reason is that they would be able to work while their children would be at school. They gave other reasons, but their answers focused on the fact that their priority was motherhood. This might be a good reason why many women don't go into Mathematics and Science majors. While this may be a credible reason for LDS girls, it may not necessarily apply non-LDS girls, so what of them? It might be true that our society discourages women to go into science and Math. It might even be true that even if women pursue science or math, they can be pushed into traditional female roles. Is this a bad thing? It can be if it is the solely reason why women don't go into these majors; if they conform to the sexist views of society that scientists and computer nerds are only males.

Technology and the Church

 Last week I talked with some people that work at the Church's Information and Communication Systems (ICS) Department. One of them mentioned that he used to think that the Church was full of older, gray-haired people that still programmed in assembly code or other really primitive languages. He then explained that the church is actually using cutting edge technology. He said that the Church doesn't just stay up to date with technology, but that it is always evaluating and implementing the newest technologies to see if they can be used. It is exciting to know that the Church does everything to stay up to date and to facilitate the use of Church systems to make church work easier for members and leaders. We, as members, need to be familiar with these technologies and how they work. There are many websites and systems available to us. I will just give one example. The Employment Resource Services department has a website that is little known (ldsjobs.com). Through this site, the Church uses available resources to help people that have lost a job, gain additional skills to improve their employment situation or hire-ability, which helps return many people to the workforce and helps ward leaders know how to help the less-fortunate members in their wards. The work of the Lord keeps moving forward at a faster pace with the implementation of these technologies and because of it, the work is now easier for Church leaders, members and even missionaries. It is up to us now to learn and utilize these resources to further spread the Gospel and share our testimonies around the world.

Cyber Attacks and National Security

Last week a cyber attack was reported on a nuclear-power plant in Iran. The cyber attack on Bushehr is dangerous because the worm is capable of reprogramming the systems controlling the power plant. Cyber attacks among states have been increasing in the last years.  It seems as if these cyber attacks have become the new form of permanent low-level warfare. One thing to worry about, that is different than other kind of attacks, is that these attacks can do a lot of damage and are very difficult to reverse, or sometimes to even detect. It is not enough to merely block Internet traffic, many systems are thought to be so important that they are never turned off to even install security patches. Most people are unaware of such security treats in the cyber world, when in reality, they are as dangerous as any other threat. It was good to see that the news of the power plant in Iran made it into the headlines of some of the major national newspapers. It will help people become more aware of the technological challenges the government faces and it will help government stay up to the task to defend the country.

Apple's ever changing policies

When Apple’s AppStore was created there were a lot of people that were disappointed because of the idea of not being able to write and install applications independently from Apple.  Some people created sites and repositories that worked with Cydia and other applications letting the users with jailbroken phones install whatever they wanted, even cracked applications.  Of course this was a double-sided weapon for developers.  In one side, they could develop and distribute applications without Apple’s approval.  This was more attractive after jailbreaking your iPhone became legal. On the other side, people could crack any application and distribute it for free (piracy!). Some people created these sites and applications with the idea of letting users try out the application before buying it, but of course many people just kept using the apps without ever paying for it.

 Just this week Apple relaxed the restrictions on the development tools used to create apps, reverting some of their restrictions set at the beginning of the year.  Now many developers that were distributing applications on Cydia and other repositories are going to submit their apps to Apple again and many will be approved.  While this might be a good thing, I believe that Apple should let us add other repositories on the AppStore and let us, the end-users, use our phones as we will.  Apple will not lose anything: a lot of people will stop jailbreaking their phones and developers will keep submitting their apps to Apple as they will want their apps in the main repository (the AppStore). Piracy might not end there, but it might decrease if Apple were to allow trials on their store.

The Digital Age

The first computer I had was so old that it had a monochromatic monitor.  It was running MS-DOS 2.x on 3.5" floppy disks.  Since then, we have come a long way.  Now, I have a "smart-phone" that lets me have access to all the information I want whenever I want it.  I don't even have to fetch it manually, it is sent directly to my device.  With all this technology and information available comes a high responsibility.  The advantages of all this technology don’t come without the disadvantages and accountability is something that gets often forgotten in the way.  As Postman suggests, this technology has made our world a whole different world, but we need to be well focused to avoid what is harmful as Elder Oaks suggests.  Don't just look at what is obviously harmful (pornography, piracy, etc.), but to what is harmful through the side effects.  The advantage of having a cellphone with me all the time might diminish the importance I give to the people around me.  For some, what might seem to be a necessity might be in reality a luxury.  Sometimes, the less technology is around us, the more we can interact with the people we love. But does this mean that we should get rid of all these gadgets that make us life easier? I say we just need to find the balance being careful in falling in the bad side of technology.

- XJ9PA9XPD2A6