Posts

In today’s New York Times, David Sanger writes about a disreputable retailer who has realized that customer complaints on consumer forums help improve the ranking of his site in Google. The company in the article is a particularly offensive example of gaming Google for profit, but they are hardly alone. Indeed, they are just an extreme case of what every search engine optimizer sells. To make an obvious point, Google (and other search engines) don’t know what people are searching for. They created a model that attempts to describe which sites people are looking for when they enter search terms. Every area where that model departs from reality is an opportunity for the clever and unscrupulous to improve their search engine rankings. For example, if Google weights links from popular consumer sites positively, even if those links are in complaints about a company for selling counterfeit merchandise, an opportunity is created to gain business by mistreating customers. ...

Three interesting links related to Google Street View washed over the transom this week. (OK, I saw them on Twitter.) The first is a collection of noteworthy photos from Google Street View. You can find it at 9eyes.tumblr.com. It’s totally addictive. The second is Michael Sippey’s pondering which elements of a Google Street View image that appears to show a woman giving birth on a sidewalk are faked. The third is the news that in Essen, Germany, Google fans threw eggs at houses that opted out of Google Street View. I put that down to boredom. ...

Over the past two days I’ve been linked to by Daring Fireball and BoingBoing. I’m running WordPress on a virtual server from SliceHost with 512 megs of RAM. Because I’m an incompetent systems administrator and just run everything with the defaults, the server did not react well to the additional traffic. Here’s a list of the things I did to whip the server into shape. The first problem was that the load average on the server was spiking and it was becoming non-responsive. Even logging into the server via SSH took minutes, and Web pages weren’t really loading at all. WordPress was not using the database efficiently and the database load was killing the server. I attacked this problem by taking advantage of caching. ...

John Gruber posted a piece on Friday that is a must read for people who are interested in mobile computing, noting an absence of killer apps for Android. In it he talks about some reasons why, despite the strengths of the platform, we’re not seeing developers create unique, compelling applications for it. I don’t use an Android device, so it could be that Gruber’s argument rests on a shaky foundation, but it seems right to me from what I’ve read. ...

Bruce Schneier has rounded up all the links on the backscatter X-ray scanners and related issues. Bullet points: The health risks of the scanners are overblown. The claims that the scanning/groping will make flying safer are even more overblown. The deployment of these scanners has more to do with lobbying than with a rational evaluation of the best way to make flying safer. In this piece (not yet linked by Schneier), TSA screeners surveyed say that conducting the more invasive patdowns makes their job worse. My inclination in the face of this new scanning is to request the patdown for exactly that reason. Walking through the machine imposes a cost on the person being scanned, and no cost on the person doing the scanning. The patdown sucks for the person conducting the patdown and the person being patted down. Seems more fair to me. ...

Alexandra Petri explains, in a funny way, what your e-mail address says about you and talks about changing fashions in the world of email. It also includes a helpful guide, here’s an example: @YourWorkEmail You either work somewhere important or don’t understand the concept behind e-mail. You have a tendency to forward people joke e-mails with picture attachments. I have long been a follower of email fashion. I think I originally subscribed to The Well because an @well.com email address had a certain amount of cachet and because I knew my ISP email address wouldn’t have any staying power. Then I realized that vanity domains were where it was at. I registered rc3.org as a place to get mail (and have a home page, of all things) before blogs even existed. Eventually I switched to Gmail (although my vanity email address and my well.com email address still work perfectly well) mainly for simplicity. When you tell someone “gmail dot com” over the phone you never have to spell anything, and nobody looks down on you for using Gmail. ...

This weekend I read a restaurant owner’s perspective on OpenTable. In short, he feels like OpenTable charges to much to arrange reservations, but that most restaurants feel like they must use it if they want to be competitive. In other words, that OpenTable has captured such a large portion of the online restaurant reservations market that they are able to extract monopoly profits. Here’s how he breaks down the numbers: One independent study estimates that OpenTable’s fees (comprised of startup fees, fixed monthly fees, and per-person reservation fees) translate to a cost of roughly $10.40 for each “incremental” 4-top booked through OpenTable.com. To put that in perspective, consider that the average profit margin, before taxes, for a U.S. restaurant is roughly 5%. This means that a table of 4 spending $200 on dinner would generate a $10 profit. In this example, all of that profit would then go to OpenTable fees for having delivered the reservation, leaving the restaurant with nothing other than the hope that that customer would come back (and hopefully book by telephone the next time). ...

One of my closely held beliefs is that expiring passwords reduce rather than increase security because the more often you have to change your passwords, the less likely you are to remember them. That is offset by the fact that people tend to use one password everywhere, so if you force people to change them, that pattern can be broken to some extent. This week, Bruce Schneier has an essay on the subject. Here’s his bottom line, but read the whole thing: ...

First Apple deprecated their Java implementation. Now they’ve released it as open source: Oracle and Apple today announced the OpenJDK project for Mac OS X. Apple will contribute most of the key components, tools and technology required for a Java SE 7 implementation on Mac OS X, including a 32-bit and 64-bit HotSpot-based Java virtual machine, class libraries, a networking stack and the foundation for a new graphical client. OpenJDK will make Apple’s Java technology available to open source developers so they can access and contribute to the effort. ...

It would probably surprise people to learn that Blizzard, a game company, provides better security options for players of its games (World of Warcraft and now Starcraft) than nearly all banks and financial services companies do for their customers. The problem Blizzard faces is that people steal World of Warcraft accounts all the time, either to use the characters to farm gold, or to just strip all of the cash and things that can be sold from the account and pocket the cash. ...