Dan's New Blog

Apple has notified customers of online music streaming site Lala that the service will shut down on May 31. The thinking is that Apple, which bought Lala at the end of last year, will launch its own music streaming service sometime in June.

First it was Google. Back in January Steve Jobs called the Big G’s “Don’t Be Evil” corporate motto “bull****”. This was yet another episode in the two companies’ long and drawn-out parting of the ways. (Although a couple of months later Steve and Google CEO Eric Schmidt did meet publicly for coffee. Why do the pictures remind me of this?)

Today it was Adobe. Steve decided to “jot down some thoughts” about why Flash will never ever make it on Apple’s mobile devices:

“Flash was created during the PC era – for PCs and mice. Flash is a successful business for Adobe, and we can understand why they want to push it beyond PCs. But the mobile era is about low power devices, touch interfaces and open web standards – all areas where Flash falls short … New open standards created in the mobile era, such as HTML5, will win on mobile devices (and PCs too). Perhaps Adobe should focus more on creating great HTML5 tools for the future, and less on criticizing Apple for leaving the past behind.”

Boom.

You have to hand it to Steve, though.  He’s all about equal-opportunity. You don’t have to be a big corporate competitor to get the Steve Jobs treatment — all you gotta do is “find” an iPhone and post it on the Web.

From Wired:

NY Times reporter Nick Bilton: How does [Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg] feel about privacy?
Unnamed Facebook employee: [laughter] He doesn’t believe in it.

I hope this quote is apocryphal.

But it rings so true …

Last May I bought a netbook. It was cheap enough — under $300 — that I decided to run an experiment: I’d go without anti-virus software for a year and see if Google Chrome would live up to its reputation as the safest of all the browsers.

So last night I fired up AVG’s free Rescue CD on a bootable flash drive — is that an oxymoron? — and let it crank for about an hour.  The results? After 50 weeks of daily use at home, in hotels, and at 2 different colleges by me and 2 other family members, the netbook contained a grand total of 4 viruses. And they were spyware-type stuff. Nothing major, more like barnacles on a boat.

Now I realize that “4 viruses” means that Chrome isn’t perfect. And I confess that maybe I’m a bit less problematic than most users — I don’t visit online porn or gambling sites (although I did download music). But still, can you imagine the carnage if I used IE for a whole year without AV?

Based on my results, I’ve decided not to load AV software on the netbook.  I don’t need it to slow me down. It’s not worth giving up the 30 second boot and 15 second shutdown times I get by running free.

And I’ll take any victory whenever and wherever I can: Android has more U.S. Web traffic than the iPhone, according to AdMob.

VentureBeat reports that Blippy, the social networking site that lets you compare your credit card purchases with other, equally self-absorbed users, inadvertently revealed some credit card numbers via a Google search. One hundred and twenty-seven, to be exact.

Blippy says in response that “it’s a lot less bad than it looks” — only 4 numbers were actually outed — and blames it on a Google cache issue. I tried the query just now; Google blocked it with the following response:

“We’re sorry… but your computer or network may be sending automated queries. To protect our users, we can’t process your request right now.”

To reiterate: “Why, oh why?“

Back in the Seventies, life was pretty homogeneous. We all watched the same TV shows on the same 3 channels. We all saw the same movies. We all read the same newspapers. (In Philadelphia, The Evening Bulletin actually claimed that “Nearly Everybody Reads the Bulletin”, which sounded real ironic when the paper folded in 1982. I still miss it.) And we all listened to the same music. The soundtrack to my senior year in high school was Saturday Night Fever. It was all over the radio. It played at every graduation party I ever went to.

I hated Saturday Night Fever.

What I didn’t realize at the time was that Saturday Night Fever was the next-to-last gasp of terminal homogeneity. (Michael Jackson’s Thriller was the last rattling wheeze.) The Seventies ended with Disco Demolition Night. The Eighties and Nineties gave us cable TV (57 Channels and Nothing On) and the Internet (Where do you want to go today?) We became lots of fragmented groups, and our choices for listening/watching/reading/consuming multiplied. We could all inhabit our own special niches.

But Facebook wants to drag me back to high school with this new “like” button thingie they introduced yesterday. Now, if I go to CNN, for example, I can read the same stories that my Facebook friends like. Or I can recommend some to them. On Pandora I can listen to the songs they like. And so on.

The problem is that I’ve never liked the same things as my friends and family. Not music. Not books. And certainly not movies. (When I stick one of my DVDs in the player, you should see the family scatter like cockroaches. What’s wrong with The Seventh Seal?) I don’t want or need to see which media my real-world friends are consuming. How much less my digital ones?

Facebook is attempting to become the nexus through which the Web passes. I get that. It’s the only way they can monetize all the personal info that people willingly give them. But as I’ve said previously:

“I know Google collects just as much personal data from me — maybe more. At least with Google it’s a quid pro quo. They give me something I value — information — in return for my data. Facebook gives me nothing I care about.”

And now they’ve given me a filter problem. I’m gonna have to deal with it, or I’ll have Stayin’ Alive stuck in my head forever.

The (first real) Web browser turns 17 today.

Item the Firsteth: The WSJ reports that on Monday privacy ministers from 10 countries — Canada, France, Germany, Ireland, Israel, Italy, The Netherlands, New Zealand, Spain, and the UK — sent Google a letter smacking the search giant around for its “disappointing disregard for fundamental privacy norms and laws.” The letter cited the ill-advised launch of Google Buzz, as well as issues with Google Street View. The letter calls on Google to “incorporate fundamental privacy principles directly into the design of new online services” by:

• Collecting and processing only the minimum amount of personal information necessary to achieve the identified purpose of the product or service
• Providing clear and unambiguous information about how personal information will be used to allow users to provide informed consent
• Creating privacy-protective default settings
• Ensuring that privacy control settings are prominent and easy to use
• Ensuring that all personal data is adequately protected
• Giving people simple procedures for deleting their accounts and honoring their requests in a timely way

(This is not the first time that European countries have clashed with Google over privacy issues. You may remember that back in September 2008 Google announced that it would anonymize search data after 9 months because of EU prodding.)

Anyway, these principles look good on paper, but I can’t see how they’d protect you if the Google Mapsmobile comes down your street and photographs you in your skivvies. And let’s hope that whatever privacy controls Google is forced to implement work a lot better than Facebook’s.

If you have a sub, here are links to the WSJ article and a PDF of the letter.

Item the Secondeth: While we’re talkin’ Google, today the search giant released a government requests tracking tool revealing that Uncle Sam made 3,580 data requests during the last 6 months of 2009. Only Brazil tops us. (Link via Wired.)

Item the Thirdth: Amazon.com has sued the North Carolina Department of Revenue to block its demand to turn over information on about 50 million transactions from 2003-2010. Amazon has no physical presence in NC, so they don’t have to charge the 5.75% state tax. However, NC has a “use tax” that they want to enforce, hence the desire to get full customer data on NC Amazon customers.

Can someone please parse the logic of this quote for me?

“A spokeswoman for the North Carolina Department of Revenue said she would have to review the lawsuit before answering why the tax agency needed Amazon customer information. ‘Any comment at this time would be premature,’ Beth Stevenson said in an e-mail message.”

I mean, you knew why you wanted the data in the first place, right? Helloooooo?

Security-wise, people are the weakest link, viz:

ITEM 1: John Markoff reports that January’s Chinese Google hack began with one person who clicked when he/she oughtn’t:

“The theft began with an instant message sent to a Google employee in China who was using Microsoft’s Messenger program, according to the person with knowledge of the internal inquiry, who spoke on the condition that he not be identified. By clicking on a link and connecting to a ‘poisoned’ Web site, the employee inadvertently permitted the intruders to gain access to his (or her) personal computer and then to the computers of a critical group of software developers at Google’s headquarters in Mountain View, Calif. Ultimately, the intruders were able to gain control of a software repository used by the development team.”

That software, called Gaia, only controls signons to a range of Google services from Gmail to Docs.

ITEM 2: Back in March, Apple software engineer Gray Powell lost a prototype of the next-gen iPhone in a bar not too far from the Apple campus. He was field-testing the device, which was camouflaged to look like your basic, garden-variety iPhone. The phone eventually wound up in the hands of Gizmodo’s Jason Chen — for a mere $5,000 — who publicly dissected it, according to the NY Times, “as if it were an alien from another planet”. Apple politely but firmly asked for it back.

From what I have read about Apple’s security-obsessed culture, right now it sucks to be Gray Powell.

UPDATE, April 27: The authorities have gotten involved.