Yesterday’s Internet Outage In Parts of U.S. and Canada You Didn’t Hear About

How a Tiny Error Shut Off the Internet for Parts of the US and Canada

Reposted from Wired

Lily Hay Newman13 hrs ago

© Joe Raedle

A year ago, a DDoS attack caused internet outages around the US by targeting the internet-infrastructure company Dyn, which provides Domain Name System services to look up web servers. Monday saw a nationwide series of outages as well, but with a more pedestrian cause: a misconfiguration at Level 3, an internet backbone company—and enterprise ISP—that underpins other big networks. Network analysts say that the misconfiguration was a routing issue that created a ripple effect, causing problems for companies like Comcast, Spectrum, Verizon, Cox, and RCN across the country.

Level 3, whose acquisition by CenturyLink closed recently, said in a statement to WIRED that it resolved the issue in about 90 minutes. “Our network experienced a service disruption affecting some customers with IP-based services,” the company said. “The disruption was caused by a configuration error.” Comcast users started reporting internet outages around the time of the Level 3 outages on Monday, but the company said that it was monitoring “an external network issue” and not a problem with its own infrastructure. RCN confirmed that it had some network problems on Monday because of Level 3. The company said it had restored RCN service by rerouting traffic to a different backbone.

 

© Downdetector.com 

The misconfiguration was a “route leak,” according to Roland Dobbins, a principal engineer at the DDoS and network-security firm Arbor Networks, which monitors global internet operations. ISPs use “Autonomous Systems,” also known as ASes, to keep track of what IP addresses are on which networks, and route packets of data between them. They use the Border Gateway Protocol (BGP) to establish and communicate routes. For example, packets can route between networks A and B, but network A can also route packets to network C through network B, and so on. This is how internet service providers interoperate to let you browse the whole internet, not just the IP addresses on their own networks.

In a “route leak,” an AS, or multiple ASes, issue incorrect information about the IP addresses on their network, which causes inefficient routing and failures for both the originating ISP and other ISPs trying to route traffic through. Think of it like a series of street signs that help keep traffic flowing in the right directions. If some of them are mislabeled or point the wrong way, assorted chaos can ensue.

Route leaks can be malicious, sometimes called “route hijacks” or “BGP hijacks,” but Monday’s incident seems to have been caused by a simple mistake that ballooned to have national impact. Large outages caused by accidental route leaks have cropped up before.

“Folks are looking to tweak routing policies, and make mistakes,” Arbor Networks’ Dobbins says. The problem could have come as CenturyLink works to integrate the Level 3 network or could have stemmed from typical traffic engineering and efficiency work.

Internet outages of all sizes caused by route leaks have occurred occasionally, but consistently, for decades. ISPs attempt to minimize them using “route filters” that check the IP routes their peers and customers intend to use to send and receive packets and attempt to catch any problematic plans. But these filters are difficult to maintain on the scale of the modern internet and can have their own mistakes.

Monday’s outages reinforce how precarious connectivity really is, and how certain aspects of the internet’s architecture—offering flexibility and ease-of-use—can introduce instability into what has become a vital service.

Facebook’s International Business Blunder: Following In The Footsteps of Google

With good intentions, and also a good dose of Facebook business strategy to expand its base of users, Mark Zuckerberg has struck out to promote Free Basics, a free limited Internet for the poor in less developed countries sponsored by Facebook and its local telecommunications partners. While on the face of it Free Basics would seem to have merit, Zuckerberg has run into a wall of opposition.  On close inspection of the details, Facebook’s problem, despite all of its global corporate sophistication, appears to be naïveté about the foreign markets it is trying to enter. It is possible to argue that Zuckerberg and Facebook have the best of intentions and sound arguments.  But the best of intentions and sound arguments mean nothing if the key element lacking is a clear understanding of the targeted foreign market, and the crucial need to adapt to it or fail.  Zuckerberg could have looked no further back than 2013 for clues to why he has failed.

In 2012 and 2013, I was involved in an effort to deploy wide area wireless Internet capability to broad swaths of India. This involved working with large Indian corporate partners. We were also working at a time when Google, Microsoft, and others were also busily competing to deploy so-called “white space Metro WiFi” to rural areas in lesser developed countries. Google was also experimenting with its “loon balloon” project to use high altitude balloons to deploy Internet access points in remote areas.  It quickly became clear to us that the Indian government and corporate officials wanted only an indigenous Indian Internet solution, which fit our strategy of working with Indian partners.  Google and the other big U.S. based companies were viewed as neo-colonialists. Ironically, on March 19, 2013, Google Chairman Eric Schmidt wrote an editorial in The Times of India, “Which Internet Will India Choose,” in a well-intentioned effort to convince Indian leaders of the Google vision for the Internet in India.  For all intents and purposes, Schmidt’s editorial landed on deaf ears in India.  Also, regrettably, Indian corporate culture being what it is, not much happened on the Indian side to develop their own Internet deployment solution. All of this is not unusual in foreign markets.

Read more: Eric Schmidt: Which Internet Will India Choose?

As a veteran of high technology international business, I am intrigued by these international business blunders by otherwise very sophisticated business leaders and corporations.  They seem to repeat themselves over the years, sometimes in different ways and in different markets. Years ago I stumbled on David A. Ricks book, Blunders in International Business, now in its fourth edition, with new and updated case studies.  It is enlightening and also quite funny.  I recommend the book to Mark Zuckerberg.

Mark Zuckerberg can’t believe Egypt  & India  aren’t grateful for Facebook’s free internet

The nerve. (AP Photo/Rajesh Kumar Singh)

December 28, 2015Quartz India

All Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg wants to do is make the world a better place for his new daughter. While he’s technically on paternity leave, he couldn’t sit idly by as India attempts to halt Internet.org, Facebook’s initiative to provide free but limited internet to the developing world.E

Last week, the Times of India reported that the country’s telecom regulatory body had asked Facebook’s partner, wireless carrier Reliance, to cease the Internet.org service as it determines whether operators should be able to price their services based on content. Responding to criticisms of the program, Zuckerberg penned an op-ed published Dec. 28 in the English-language daily. In it, he expressed annoyance that India is debating net neutrality—a principle dictating that telecom operators provide people with equal access to the internet—as the country struggles to connect its citizens to the internet.

In the process of defending Internet.org, Zuckerberg paints India—where about a billion people are not connected to the internet—as backwards for even daring to question the benefits of Facebook’s charity-like endeavor.

“Who could possibly be against this?” he asks passive-aggressively. “Surprisingly, over the last year there’s been a big debate about this in India.”

Yes, net neutrality is a big deal—and not just in India. In the US, for example, an appeals court is currently examining the legality of a new set of net-neutrality rules enacted by the Federal Communications Commission this year. But Zuckerberg almost portrays net neutrality as a first-world problem that doesn’t apply to India because having some service is better than no service.

Net neutrality activists have long argued that Internet.org provides a “walled garden” experience because the sites that users can access for free are determined by Facebook and its telecom partners, essentially making them gatekeepers to the internet for poor people.

While Zuckerberg acknowledges that Internet.org, which is currently active in more than 30 countries, does not provide people with access to the full web, he argues that it’s a step in the right direction. According to the Facebook CEO, half of the people who come online for the first time using Internet.org decide to pay for full internet access within 30 days.

Instead of wanting to give people access to some basic internet services for free, critics of the program continue to spread false claims–even if that means leaving behind a billion people.

Instead of recognizing the fact that Free Basics is opening up the whole internet, they continue to claim–falsely–that this will make the internet more like a walled garden.

Instead of welcoming Free Basics as an open platform that will partner with any telco, and allows any developer to offer services to people for free, they claim–falsely–that this will give people less choice.

Instead of recognizing that Free Basics fully respects net neutrality, they claim–falsely–the exact opposite.

Zuckerberg continues by offering an anecdote of a farmer named Ganesh, who uses the free internet service to check weather updates and commodity prices. “How does Ganesh being able to better tend his crops hurt the internet?” he asks rhetorically.

But examined more closely, his arguments don’t directly address the concerns of net neutrality activists. For the people who choose not to upgrade or can’t afford to pay for full internet access, Internet.org does indeed provide a walled garden of online content. Millions of people already have a skewed perception of the web, believing Facebook to be the internet, a Quartz analysis has shown.

Furthermore, while Facebook can add more telecom partners, which would theoretically open up the number of sites and services Internet.org users could access for free, it currently has only one partner in India, Reliance.

Zuckerberg also fails to address the claims that zero-rated services such as Internet.org amount to economic discrimination—that this is essentially poor internet for poor people. Furthermore, in an op-ed published in the Times of India in October, net-neutrality advocacy group Savetheinternet.in quoted Tim Berners-Lee, father of the internet, as saying: “Economic discrimination is just as harmful as technical discrimination, so [internet service providers] will still be able to pick winners and losers online.” Facebook’s walled garden could very well determine the sites and services that will succeed in India.

Over and over again, Zuckerberg has pointed to research showing that internet access can help lift people out of poverty. The fact remains that Internet.org provides limited, slow, and subpar access, and these limitations make it all the more difficult for people to climb the economic ladder. As Naveen Patnaik, chief minister of the Indian state Odisha, has said: “If you dictate what the poor should get, you take away their rights to choose what they think is best for them.”

Too Many Apps. Too Little Money

 

Hopefully this comes as no surprise to many, but for some, alas, I am afraid they have yet to get the email.  It’s yet another case of the 1% versus the 99%. Only one percent of Web app developers have made any real money, the other ninety-nine percent are SOL.  Forty-seven percent of those, make absolutely no money or less than $100 on their app. Not surprisingly there are now over a million apps on the Apple store, and when you add all of the other sources for apps, you can see that the problem is coming to a head. I saw this coming nearly two years ago and wrote about the problem on this blog, citing a New York Times story published about that time, describing the dark underbelly of the Web app development culture.  In a satire of the problem, last year The Onion published a gag story about a new app called “Squander” that enabled users to “geolocate others nearby who had also wasted $2 on the same app.”

Read more: App development boom’s depressing underbelly, November 18, 2012

Read more: Silicon Valley’s misguided love affair with an app for everything, March 4, 2013

 

Reblogged from ValleyWag, July 25th, 2014

There Are Officially Too Many Apps, And Nobody Is Making

Money

Sam Biddle

• 

The new American Dream was going so well: drop out, make an app for sending emojis that disappear after 5 seconds, and collect your check. But it turns out the app gold rush is brokenfor almost everyone.

The Majority Of Today’s App Businesses Are Not Sustainable | TechCrunch

Though the app stores continue to fill up with ever more mobile applications, the reality is that…Read on techcrunch.​com

A new, giant survey of 10,000 app developers from around the world reveals a hugely depressing reality: your app will almost certainly not succeed. Maybe it’s a given that in such a crowded market, standing out is a tough feat. But the numbers are terribly dismal: 2 percent ofall app developers pull in over 50 percent of all app revenue—”The revenue distribution is so heavily skewed towards the top that just 1.6% of developers make multiples of the other 98.4% combined.” A staggering 47% of app developers either make literally no money, or less than $100 per month, per app. Hardly Instagram money, or even decent-Instagram-knockoff money.

Developer Economics Q3 2014: State of the Developer Nation – Developer Economics

Based on a survey of 10,000+ app developers, State of the Developer Nation Q3 2014 investigates the …Read on developereconomics.​com

It’s easy to understand why. There are well over a million apps in Apple’s App Store alone, and unless you’re in the tippy-top of tippiest-top, odds are nobody will even notice you exist. Of course, the fact that it’s considered gauche to even try to make money as a software business doesn’t help:

VisionMobile, which conducted the study, concludes that “It seems extremely unlikely the market can sustain anything like the current level of developers for many more years.”

Good. The fewer people chase dreams of becoming the next Yo (a sentence that makes me want to sever my fingers, one by one), the more young talent can dedicate itself to building the next Washboard.

The Man Who Gave “Yo” $200,000

This week, a group of otherwise mentally sound adults agreed to go fucking insane all at once. The…Read more

The Digital Utopian Vision of Marshall McLuhan and Stewart Brand Is Cracking

It appears to me that the original vision and promise of the Internet, referred to by many as Digital Utopianism, is at severe risk of deteriorating into a “balkanized”  and severely impaired World Wide Web.

Internet barriers, censorship, protectionist Internet policy, and ubiquitous surveillance seem to be the emerging new reality.  Notable digital luminaries the likes of Vin Cerf and Bill Gates have been questioned on this point, and both have expressed no major concern about deterioration of the freedom of the Internet or with the original Utopian vision.  The argument is that the World Wide Web cannot be effectively blocked or censored.  Google would probably respond that their “loon balloons” could simply be launched to counter censorship. As a long time Silicon Valley high tech executive, I understand this optimistic view, but the facts on the ground are now providing serious evidence that the Internet is under attack, and may not survive unless there is a significant shift in these new trends.

This week alone, Turkey’s Erdogan has tried to block both Twitter and YouTube to prevent Turks from viewing evidence of his corrupt government. This morning’s New York Times reports Edward Snowden’s latest revelation.  While the U.S. government and media were investigating and publicly reporting on Chinese government Internet espionage and Chinese network equipment manufacturer Huawei, the NSA, the British GCHQ and Canada’s  Security Intelligence Service (CSIS) ,  were all collaborating, doing exactly the same thing. The hypocrisy and irony of this is not lost on either the Chinese or the Internet community. CBS 60 Minutes reported on the Chinese espionage, but has been essentially silent on NSA’s own transgressions. 60 Minutes even broadcast a report that NSA metadata was essentially harmless, which has now been shown to be false. The 60 Minutes objective reporting problem is the canary in the coal mine of the corporate takeover of media and the Web.  Protectionist policies in various countries targeted against Google, Microsoft and others are emerging. One of the many negative effects of the NSA revelations was the announcement this week that the United States was giving up control of the International Committee for Assigned Names and Numbers (ICANN), which essentially sets Internet traffic policy. Finally, this week, Netflix spoke out forcefully against the “peering agreement” it was blackmailed into signing with Comcast to insure “quality of service” (QOS) for Netflix programming to the edges of the Web.

Read more: NSA breached Chinese servers

Read more: Netflix Thinks Peering Should Be A Net Neutrality Issue

I recently came across Professor Fred Turner, Professor of Communication at Stanford. It has been a revelation for me.  His book, “From Counterculture to Cyberculture’ is an acclaimed milestone work. Turner has articulated the World I lived in the counterculture of the 1960’s and in the early Silicon Valley. His work explaining the evolution from the “counterculture” of the 1960’s to the emerging new “cyberculture” of the late 1980’s and 1990’s is an excellent record of that time in northern California.  This was the World of Steve Jobs at that time and his personal evolvement to a digital Utopian.  It is detailed in Jobs biography, and in Jobs wonderful Stanford University 2005 commencement speech, in which he also acknowledged the importance of Stewart Brand and the Whole Earth Catalog.  This was also my countercultural World as a Communications student at San Jose State at that time, in the heart of the Silicon Valley, and subsequent high tech career, beginning at Intel Corporation.  But even Professor Turner has expressed his own ambivalence about the future direction of the Web, though only from the standpoint of less worrying lack of diversity of Web communities. My concern is much more deeply based on current evidence and much more ominous.

Fred Turner, Stanford Professor of Communication – Counterculture to Cyberculture

Stewart Brand, the father of the Whole Earth Catalog and the original digital utopia visionary, has been rethinking its basic concepts. Brand has come around 180 degrees from environmental Utopianism based on “back to the land,” and is now embracing the future importance of urban enclaves. While this new urban view is now a widely held idea by many futurists, it can also be viewed as another facet of the end of digital utopia.  This TEDTalk by Brand lays out his new vision.  Where we go from here is anyone’s guess.

Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy: Largest Cyber Attack In History Slows The Internet

The last two days have seen one of the most interesting and disturbing examples of the ongoing problems with Internet security, and the potential of contending with anonymous groups and aggressive or governments who use the Internet for hostile purposes.  We have just experienced the largest Internet cyber attack in history.  The New York Times, The Guardian and host of other global media and technology news sources, and blogs have seized on this story.  Internet experts are pessimistic that anything can be done to defend against this situation, or any other similar attack, other than to find and prosecute the perpetrators.  Some experts have speculated that another attack on this scale could have grave consequences for the global banking and investment trading systems.

Read more: http://www.nytimes.com/2013/03/28/technology/attacks-on-spamhaus-used-internet-against-itself.html?pagewanted=all

The attack was restricted to simply slowing the Internet to a crawl in some places around the World.  But it has already been seen that such attacks can target the electrical grid, water systems, natural gas distribution: any essential infrastructure system attached to the Internet, even with state-of-the-art firewalls and other security measures.  This feels like the Cold War spy world of John Le Carre‘s George Smiley, and the current film Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy, only fast forwarded to the cyber world of 2013.. It is a game of leap frog with no end in sight.

If any of my UBC Management students noticed a distinct slowing of their Internet traffic over the last two days, they were not imagining it.  This has been a dramatic foreshadowing of the George Orwell Brave New World we are entering, a dispute between two virtually unknown Internet companies and a group of hackers in Eastern Europe has led to the largest global Internet cyber attack in history.  The attack continues tonight, though it is apparently diminishing.  Internet security experts who have been monitoring global Internet traffic for the last two days, estimate that the attack is at least three times larger than any previous “distributed denial of service” attack observed.  A distributed denial of service or DDOS attack, occurs when someone or a group, creates small Internet “bots” (robot code) that are unleashed across the global Internet.  The bots enter our computers, unknown to us, and sit in our Internet devices, until they are ordered by their Master to simply “ping” or go to one specific Internet address.  This essentially overloads the Internet backbone, and the destination Web site, making it unreachable by anyone. The only solution is to take the Website completely offline and to wait for the storm of “bots” to diminish.  This kind of thing has been around for years, but it continues to be very difficult to defend against. Until a source is identified, all users must be denied access to the Website. Hence the name, “denial of service.”  This time, DDOS has risen to a new level.

The two companies involved in the original dispute were Spamhaus and a Dutch website known as Cyber Bunker. Anyone ever heard of either of them?  Spamhaus works to identify and block SPAM. When Spamhaus decided to include Cyber Bunker in its list of offending spammers, it appears the Cyber Bunker retaliated and recruited a group of criminal hackers in Eastern Europe to help them stage the largest DDOS attack in history. Some have described it as a “nuclear bomb dropped on the Internet.”

We only have more of this to look forward to, as Internet infrastructure experts do not have any silver bullet to offer us.

Big Data, The Cloud And Smart Mobile Are Actually One Big Thing

ToDaClo is a current buzz word of sorts for “touch-data-cloud,” (or Big Data, The Cloud and Smart Mobile)  which appears to have been coined by a writer for Forbes magazine during a talk in Paris in May 2012.  The speaker declared the death of the previous buzz word, SoLoMo (social-local-mobile). ToDaClo does not seem to have caught on beyond France as most of the writing and blogging about it is in French.  SoLoMo had a following for some time, and even has an online manifesto, vaguely implying location based services, which have been a major mobile feature for some time in Asia, but not here.  I think the bottom line is that both of these acronyms are trying to communicate the concept that Big Data, The Cloud and Smart Mobile are inter-related.  I actually think of them as One Big Thing, even The Next Big Thing, or perhaps “Ne-Bi-Ng”  (Nebing) as some may prefer, though I doubt Nebing will ever catch on.  Sanjay Poonen, President & CEO of SAP also views them as One Big Thing.

Reblogged from Gigaom

The secret to tackling mobile, cloud and big data? Treat them as one.

by Sanjay Poonen

Sanjay Poonen, President & CEO of SAP AG

SUMMARY:It’s no secret that mobile, big data and cloud computing are transforming IT. Sanjay Poonen, president of SAP’s mobile division, says companies need a single unified strategy to tackle them, not three separate ones.

There is widespread agreement—across the globe and in every industry—that mobile, big data, and cloud computing are the three cornerstone issues of tomorrow’s business environment. In fact, a strong organizational response to each of these issues is already critical to competitive survival.

As a result, CIOs, business strategists and IT leaders are working furiously to make sure their businesses have plans in place to stay ahead of these challenges. But there is one subtlety that is frequently overlooked: When it comes to mobile computing, big data and the cloud, what we have is not three problems but one.

Rising in unison

It’s not a coincidence that the profile of these three business challenges rose in parallel. Mobile, big data, and cloud are not siloed concerns easily addressed in isolation. They exist in an overlapping matrix, where the importance of each issue increases because it leverages (or helps solve) an issue raised by one of the others.

For example, in the days before mobile computing, business users typically did all their work using just a handful of applications. Today, the average smartphone has 41 apps installed on it. And each of those applications sparks a need to consider security, since it generates data each and every time it is used. And because these devices are often connected to service provider networks – rather than directly with corporate servers – a great deal of that business app data requires secure cloud storage.

Thus the proliferation of mobile devices exacerbates the big data problem, which in turn precipitates the demand for cloud.

In short, they are all part of a single, converged and symbiotic trend. And to address them optimally requires a holistic perspective on all three.

No bottom in sight

With global demand for mobile computing at the heart of this escalation, it makes sense that IT strategists would be keenly interested in the trend lines for mobile adoption. Today, 87 percent of the world’s population owns a mobile phone; 60 million Android devices were sold in the second quarter of 2012, and now 1 million new Android devices are provisioned daily, according to Google. As of last month, there were likely more smartphones on the planet than humans, according to Cisco.

So the question is whether there is a saturation point on the horizon that could help curb this cloud/mobile/data demand? Surprisingly, no. The average number of mobile devices per employee worldwide has already reached three to five, and adoption rates continue to grow as consumers add tablets and ever-more capable smartphones to their mobile arsenals.

But consumers’ ceaseless enthusiasm for new form factors and functionality is not the whole story behind the world’s bottomless demand for mobility. Today, businesses themselves – rather than consumers – are adding fuel to the fire.

Not just a BYOD issue

As industries finally crest the hump of transforming their workflows to leverage mobile device availability, they drive new demand – not only for mobile devices, but for new scalable infrastructures that deliver more actionable intelligence from their big data.

Finance Consumer banks, operators and retailers are widely deploying mobile commerce capabilities, which, in addition to automating traditional transactions, must include on-demand access to unstructured data, such as check images.

Manufacturing  Mobile devices on the factory floor automate manual processes, thereby feeding more rapid information into the system. This makes it possible to detect and respond early to issues that take a toll on quality or productivity, such as supplier errors.

Retail  Retailers are giving regional store managers mobile app access to daily and even real-time sales performance data on the floor, allowing them to optimize displays and customer service to sell more of the most popular items.

Health care Thanks to new mobile apps and devices, the details of every patient interaction is now entered into the system nearly instantaneously. This provides a basis for a more efficient and orchestrated care response, and in some cases leading to more rapid or accurate diagnoses.

The internet of things

As mobile technology embeds itself into more and more objects, vehicles, buildings, sensors and machines, the heterogeneity of actionable business information will only grow. “Annual global IP traffic will surpass the zettabyte threshold by the end of 2016,” reports Cisco. “In 2016, global IP traffic will reach 1.3 zettabytes per year or 109.5 exabytes per month.” (As we already know, there are currently at least 2.7 zettabytes in storage globally).

Smart equipment and vehicles will upload data to service provider networks as well as private networks, and organizations will need a plan to normalize data in many forms and from many sources. The scalable infrastructures we design today to store and structure such varied data are critical to the enablement of the business innovations we will need in the future.

The effect of this convergence is already apparent, especially in the area of business intelligence. Mobile business intelligence makes it possible for organizations to provide analytics on key performance metrics to a wider variety of employees – not just for executives. Once employees get a taste for how mobile apps fuel greater effectiveness in their job duties, they will push for more dashboards and more data. And these big data stores can’t be undertaken without cloud, to facilitate real-time performance, nor mobile devices and apps, to deliver data into the field where it’s put to good use.

Embracing the Entanglement

The interdependence of mobile, big data and cloud is undeniable, and will only multiply as data growth and mobile use continue. Yet our strategic thinking lags behind the evidence. As we have learned from IT revolutions of the past, a partial strategy is worse than no strategy at all, as you can end up with an inflexible, tactical implementation that requires a ‘rip and replace’ approach.

Organizations that manage to avoid a false start with a siloed strategy will create a network design better aligned with where IT will be in five years. In short, the most successful organizations recognize the secret alliance of mobile, big data and cloud early, and develop a holistic strategy considering all three in concert.

IEEE Seminar, February 6th, 5PM, EME 1151

 

 

IEEE Okanagan Subsection
Presents
Mr. David Mayes
Faculty of Management, Global Internet Group, LLP
Big Data, the Cloud, and Smart Mobile: Big
Deal or Not?
Time & Date: 5pm-6pm, February 6, 2013
Location: EME 1151, UBC Okanagan campus
Talk Abstract: We are hearing regularly in the media about so-called “Big Data.” Is Big Data so
transformational that it will change our everyday lives, or is it just another evolutionary advance
that may improve productivity but not much else? The same arguments may apply to the concept
of “The Cloud,” and “Smart Mobile,” the other two major trends. I say that the three, taken together,
are coalescing into the most important new force in information technology in decades. They will
drive further innovation and productivity enhancements into the foreseeable future. The talk will
explore all three trends and pose questions for the future.
Speaker Biography: Mr. David Mayes is a full-time Lecturer in entrepreneurship, communication,
negotiation, IT and strategic management at The University of British Columbia, Faculty of
Management, and Master’s degree program. Mr. Mayes was founder and spokesperson for the Intel,
Microsoft and Compaq initiative for high speed consumer “universal” DSL Internet access. Mr.
Mayes also led a number of other major industry initiatives: Vendors’ ISDN Association, V.92
modem consortium. Mr. Mayes joined with Microsoft as an author of the IETF security protocol
PPTP (point to point tunneling protocol), creating secure “virtual private networks” across the
Internet. Mr. Mayes formed solar energy company, Sola Renewable Energy Ltd., and was
Executive Director and Chairperson of the Okanagan Environmental Industry Alliance (OEIA),
which works directly with local, regional, provincial and federal Canadian government groups.
Mr. Mayes began his career at Intel Corporation in California, Oregon and Europe. He left Intel
while based at Intel’s European HQ, to form his first entrepreneurial venture, 01 Computers Group
Ltd., based in London. Its corporate clients included the BBC, British Telecom and Imperial
Chemical Industries. Recently, Mr. Mayes was Vice President of Business Development at P-Cube,
iBEAM Broadcasting, and Director of Business Development at Ascend Communications. Mr.
Mayes was directly involved in a variety of multinational venture investments, public, private
mergers, acquisitions, corporate partnerships, and sales, including Ascend’s acquisitions of NetStar
and Cascade Communications.
Pizza and drinks will be provided after the talk. For further information please contact:
Julian Cheng (email: julian.cheng@ubc.ca)

 

Marshall McLuhan Was At Least Half Right

As an undergraduate student of Speech-Communication, I vividly recall learning about Marshall McLuhan, and the day we all watched the short video The Global Village,   a short kaleidoscopic film, and read the very brief pictorial paperback book, “The Medium is the Message,”multiple times.  Both were way ahead of their time.  These were heady times in the academic world.  As this was at least 15 years before the advent of the Internet, we were all grasping at the profundity of what McLuhan was saying to us….not realizing that this guy was predicting the World Wide Web.. Holy Shit!   We tried reading his books but found that they were so dense as to be impossible to read… What we could “sorta” get was “the medium was the message” visual representation and that weird little book..  I recall thinking that what McLuhan was saying was so cool, and chuckling about it, though I still could not fully grasp it.. I was experiencing the “cosmic giggle” that became the tag line for Rolling Stone magazine at that time.  And then, of course, Woody Allen immortalized McLuhan, by putting him into that scene in Annie Hall, where McLuhan walks up and tells the guy next to Allen and Diane Keaton, that he is completely full of shit, and understands nothing about his work. Whew!

Today, I look back on that time, struggling with McLuhan’s vision, and shake my head in utter awe..  It was as if we were sitting at the feet of Einstein desperately trying to explain relativity to us, and we just couldn’t quite get it.

We certainly get it now. Marshall McLuhan is my personal choice for intellectual giant of the second half of the 20th Century. This gives full due credit to Einstein.

But something interesting is happening with the Medium and the Global Village. It is bifurcating, at least for now.  The World Wide Web is continuing on its happy way, morphing over and over again as we go, now becoming only three important threads: The Cloud, Big Data, and Smart Mobile…The efforts of China, Iran, North Korea and others to control the Web, in my view, and the view of others, may be pathetic wastes of time, effort, money and technology. On the other hand it could be the beginning of “balkanization” of the Internet.  The Berlin Wall came down and the Great Wall is nothing more than a tourist attraction.  Efforts to stop the Web may be like King Canute trying to stop the waves, or it may be the beginning of a new Internet era.  But nothing else matters anymore, and for now nothing can stop it.

But on the more tangible side, financial, economic and political globalization things are retrograde.  The Economist this week reported that the World is less economically connected than it was in 2007, indeed less than it was in 2005.  It is an extraordinary contrast with the evolution of the WWW.  The Global Interconnectedness Index, rather like the index of consumer confidence, is reporting that people around the World believe that we are more globally interconnected economically than we actually are. Foreign Direct Investment is way down, and my guess is that it may not recover soon.. A whole raft of global political issues are beginning to emerge that are restraining economic globalization, rather like mercantilism in the 18th Century and how it evolved and morphed over time.

The World is not yet ready.. Years ago, the University of California at Santa Cruz had a graduate program entitled The History of Consciousness, led by Professor Cesar Grana. I met with Professor Grana at the time, and was fascinated at his approach to McLuhan’s vision.  Everything is connected: art, science, music, theology, and it has evolved as the human race has evolved.

What we have with the current pull back from economic globalization is the fact that the human race is simply not ready to embrace a complete Global Village.  We are on the edges of it with World Music, and the World Wide Web, but it appears that full economic and political realization of Stuart Brand’s Whole Earth Catalog....as described by Steve Job’s in his now famous 2005 commencement address at Stanford…is just not here yet, though some of us have been waiting for years.  Jobs passed on and some of us may as well before this chapter is closed.

As Steve Jobs told us, the last edition of the Whole Earth Catalog advised us to “Stay hungry. Stay foolish.”

Facebook’s False Face Undermines Its Credibility

My LinkedIn post this morning, “Code Literacy: A 21st Century Requirement,” led me to read this article from the New York Times, and to consider just how complex the cyber world has become for all of us.

Managing your internal IT environment is becoming a thing of the past, passe’ and utterly inadequate in the face of the new cyber world.  Privacy is dead in the realm of Big Data, and this week’s investigation of General Petraeus‘  emails only underscore the issue.   So-called “bots” troll the Internet, pinging here and there, looking for security holes to exploit. The ingenious  “stuxnet bot” may have been the first sophisticated cyber warfare weapon, and it surely will not be the last. Designed exclusively to find and infect a very specific and very small Siemens industrial controller module, it appears to have set back the Iranian nuclear program by as much as five years.   The global search engines send out their own “bots”  to scan Web pages. Created by armies of Ph.D mathematicians employed by Google, Microsoft, Yahoo and others, they are designed to “optimize” your search results, with each company employing a slightly different set of algorithms.  Cookies have been around for ever, and are the currency of e-commerce.  Try blocking cookies and see what happens.  Spyware and malware have replaced old-fashioned viruses. The global war on SPAM has reduced the amount of it making its way into your inbox. But as cyber security experts remind us,  in any covert war each new defense creates a new offense, and so on ad infinitum.   Facebook, perhaps due to its own popularity (rather like the well-known security problems with Windows and Internet Explorer), is now targeted by humans and “bots”  with false pages, posts and “likes.”

http://www.nytimes.com/2012/11/13/technology/false-posts-on-facebook-undermine-its-credibility.html?smid=pl-share

New York Times

By SOMINI SENGUPTA

Published: November 12, 2012

SAN FRANCISCO — The Facebook page for Gaston Memorial Hospital, in Gastonia, N.C., offers a chicken salad recipe to encourage healthy eating, tips on avoiding injuries at Zumba class, and pictures of staff members dressed up at Halloween. Typical stuff for a hospital in a small town.

 

But in October, another Facebook page for the hospital popped up. This one posted denunciations of President Obama and what it derided as “Obamacare.” It swiftly gathered hundreds of followers, and the anti-Obama screeds picked up “likes.” Officials at the hospital, scrambling to get it taken down, turned to their real Facebook page for damage control. “We apologize for any confusion,” they posted on Oct. 8, “and appreciate the support of our followers.”

The fake page came down 11 days later, as mysteriously as it had come up. The hospital says it has no clue who was behind it.

Fakery is all over the Internet. Twitter, which allows pseudonyms, is rife with fake followers, and has been used to spread false rumors, as it was during Hurricane Sandy. False reviews are a constant problem on consumer Web sites. Fakery also can ruin the credibility of search results for the social search engine that Facebook says it is building.

Gaston Memorial’s experience is an object lesson in the problem of fakery on Facebook. For the world’s largest social network, it is an especially acute problem, because it calls into question its basic premise. Facebook has sought to distinguish itself as a place for real identity on the Web. As the company tells its users: “Facebook is a community where people use their real identities.” It goes on to advise: “The name you use should be your real name as it would be listed on your credit card, student ID, etc.”

Fraudulent “likes” damage the trust of advertisers, who want clicks from real people they can sell to and whom Facebook now relies on to make money. Fakery also can ruin the credibility of search results for the social search engine that Facebook says it is building.

Facebook says it has always taken the problem seriously, and recently stepped up efforts to cull fakes from the site. “It’s pretty much one of the top priorities for the company all the time,” said Joe Sullivan, who is in charge of security at Facebook.

The fakery problem on Facebook comes in many shapes. False profiles are fairly easy to create; hundreds can pop up simultaneously, sometimes with the help of robots, and often they persuade real users into friending them in a bid to spread malware. Fake Facebook friends and likes are sold on the Web like trinkets at a bazaar, directed at those who want to enhance their image. Fake coupons for meals and gadgets can appear on Facebook newsfeeds, aimed at tricking the unwitting into revealing their personal information.

Somewhat more benignly, some college students use fake names in an effort to protect their Facebook content from the eyes of future employers.

Mr. Sullivan declined to say what portion of the company’s now one billion plus users were fake. The company quantified the problem last June, in responding to an inquiry by the Securities and Exchange Commission. At that time, the company said that of its 855 million active users, 8.7 percent, or 83 million, were duplicates, false or “undesirable,” for instance, because they spread spam.

Mr. Sullivan said that since August, the company had put in place a new automated system to purge fake “likes.” The company said it has 150 to 300 staff members to weed out fraud.

Flags are raised if a user sends out hundreds of friend requests at a time, Mr. Sullivan explained, or likes hundreds of pages simultaneously, or most obvious of all, posts a link to a site that is known to contain a virus. Those suspected of being fakes are warned. Depending on what they do on the site, accounts can be suspended.

In October, Facebook announced new partnerships with antivirus companies. Facebook users can now download free or paid antivirus coverage to guard against malware.

“It’s something we have been pretty effective at all along,” Mr. Sullivan said.

Facebook’s new aggressiveness toward fake “likes” became noticeable in September, when brand pages started seeing their fan numbers dip noticeably. An average brand page, Facebook said at the time, would lose less than 1 percent of its fans.

But the thriving market for fakery makes it hard to keep up with the problem. Gaston Memorial, for instance, first detected a fake page in its name in August; three days later, it vanished. The fake page popped up again on Oct. 4, and this time filled up quickly with the loud denunciations of the Obama administration. Dallas P. Wilborn, the hospital’s public relations manager, said her office tried to leave a voice-mail message for Facebook but was disconnected; an e-mail response from the social network ruled that the fake page did not violate its terms of service. The hospital submitted more evidence, saying that the impostor was using its company logo.

Eleven days later, the hospital said, Facebook found in its favor. But by then, the local newspaper, The Gaston Gazette, had written about the matter, and the fake page had disappeared.

Facebook declined to comment on the incident, and pointed only to its general Statement of Rights and Responsibilities.

The election season seems to have increased the fakery….