Digital Life by Chin Wong

I’m a Mac, I’m an Ubuntu PC

2010-03-08T16:19:01Z

MAKE desktop Linux more attractive than Mac OS X. That was the challenge that Ubuntu founder Mark Shuttleworth issued to open source developers in July 2008.

“The great task in front of us over the next two years is to lift the experience of the Linux desktop from something that is stable and robust and not so pretty, into something that is art,” Shuttleworth told participants at the O’Reilly Open Source Convention back then. “Can we not only emulate, but can we blow right past Apple?”

“I see this [need] for free software―beautiful, elegant software. We have to invest in making this desktop beautiful and useful,” Shuttleworth said of Linux.

Now, almost two years later, Shuttleworth seems ready to put his money where his mouth is with the coming release of Lucid Lynx, the first Ubuntu to break out of its dark brown motif and orange “Human” theme since the distribution was introduced in 2004.

In a blog entry this month, Jono Bacon, Ubuntu community manager at Canonical, offered the public a glimpse of the new look that the popular Linux distribution will sport when it is launched in April.

“The new style of Ubuntu is driven by the theme ‘Light,’” Bacon writes. “We’ve developed a comprehensive set of visual guidelines and treatments that reflect that style, and are updating key assets like the logo accordingly. The new theme takes effect in 10.04 LTS and will define our look and feel for several years.”

The new logo and theme were developed by a small team led by Shuttleworth, to create a refreshed brand that reflect the qualities of precision, reliability, collaboration and freedom. Details of their work and sample screens can be found at https://wiki.ubuntu.com/Brand. Longtime Ubuntu users will immediately notice that the dark brown desktop background has been replaced by a purple field with patches of light.

Bacon expounds on the new theme and how it relates to software:

“We’re drawn to Light because it denotes both warmth and clarity, and intrigued by the idea that ‘light’ is a good value in software. Good software is ‘light’ in the sense that it uses your resources efficiently, runs quickly, and can easily be reshaped as needed. Ubuntu represents a break with the bloatware of proprietary operating systems and an opportunity to delight to those who use computers for work and play. More and more of our communications are powered by light, and in future, our processing power will depend on our ability to work with light, too.... Visually, light is beautiful, light is ethereal, light brings clarity and comfort.”

While most users commenting on Bacon’s blog liked the new logo, some were more critical of the new theme.

“A major step in wrong direction,” one user said. “For me the message goes like [this]: ‘ If you squint long enough you can fool yourself [that] it’s a Mac.”

One feature of the theme—moving the windows controls (minimize, maximize and close) from the upper right corner to the upper left--drew a lot of criticism, and rightly so. As a Mac and Ubuntu user, I immediately recognized this for what it was, a blind imitation of OS X that served no useful function – except perhaps to favor left-handed people, who make up only 7 percent to 10 percent of the adult population.

Most right-handed users will now have to move their mouse (or finger if they’re using a touch pad) to the left to access the new controls, as I have to do on the Mac. This doesn’t take a lot of time, but it does fly in the face of using resources – in this case, the space on a window – efficiently.

I have been a satisfied Mac user for a number of years, but there are aspects of the Mac interface I do not want to see on Ubuntu, my main platform of choice these days. Trivial as it may seem, the windows control buttons are one example.

The other OS X feature that I hope will never be imitated is the idea of removing the menu bar from individual application windows and putting them on a changeable panel at the top of the screen, a setup that I still find confusing and inconvenient after all this time.

The goal to make desktop Linux cool and beautiful is one that all Ubuntu users can get behind. But wholesale imitation of Mac OS X, which evokes images of Apple’s “I’m a Mac” commercials, isn’t the way to go.

Frankly, with Compiz activated and tweaked to my liking, my Ubuntu desktop is already way cooler than my Mac, and I’ve got my windows controls on the right side, where I want them.

One of the joys of using Linux is that you can make it look like anything you want. You can even use screen effects that blow the Mac out of the water. The problem is that getting there isn’t that easy, as anyone who has used the dense Compiz Settings Manager knows. Maybe instead of merely creating a new default theme, Ubuntu designers can also look at how they can make personalizing the look and feel of their desktop easier and more fun.

The US war on open source

2010-03-02T00:49:00Z

FOR years, American companies have been beating developing countries over the head for copyright violations, egging the US government to threaten trade sanctions against those who do not toe the intellectual property line. Now the same US companies are trying to bludgeon countries such as India, Indonesia, the Philippines, Thailand and Vietnam into abandoning policies that favor open source software for use in their own public agencies.

Let’s think about that for a moment.

These US companies want to dictate to our government how to go about procuring the software that we use. And the weapon they wield is the annual Special 301 Report issued by the Office of the United States Trade Representative, a federal agency responsible for developing and recommending trade policy to the US president.

As part of its yearly review, the US trade agency studies the recommendations submitted by various American trade associations, and puts the worst violators of intellectual property rights into its Priority Watch List, a group that could face US trade sanctions.

The International Intellectual Property Alliance (IIPA), an umbrella organization of about 1,900 US companies from the publishing, film and TV, music and software industries, has been religious in making its voice heard in the annual review.

In its latest report, a 498-page document, the IIPA recommended that the Philippines be moved into the Priority Watch List for a number of continuing copyright problems, including our easy access to cheap DVD entertainment.

Then, in a portion on draft legislation, it added: “IIPA was concerned regarding reports of consideration of a Free Open Source Software bill which would require government offices to use open source software. Passage of that bill would deny technology choice regarding software usage and ultimately would stunt the growth of the IT industry in the Philippines.”

The group was even more hostile when it came to Indonesia, Thailand and Vietnam, which already have such policies in place. In these instances, the US trade group argued that open source doesn’t really reduce piracy and may even encourage it by not giving software its proper value.

In one part of the report, the IIPA takes Thailand to task for wanting to bundle free and open source software on 1.4 million computers for the school system as a way of saving money and ensuring that the programs used are not pirated.

Elsewhere, the association strongly urges the US Trade Representative “to consider the implications that Indonesia’s open source preference policy has on IP protection and access to Indonesia’s market for US goods and services.”

“The Indonesian government’s policy… simply weakens the software industry and undermines its long-term competitiveness by creating an artificial preference for companies offering open source software and related services, even as it denies many legitimate companies access to the government market,” the IIPA said. “Rather than fostering a system that will allow users to benefit from the best solution available in the market, irrespective of the development model, it encourages a mindset that does not give due consideration to the value to intellectual creations. As such, it fails to build respect for intellectual property rights.”

The last sentence is a steaming pile of cow manure. Open source advocates and developers respect intellectual property rights; that’s why open source projects are covered by licenses, too. Users just don’t have to pay exorbitant fees for them.

In attacking open source, the IIPA neglects to point out that major American technology companies, including IBM and Oracle, already do a substantial amount of business using this model. Would they, too, be denied access to government bids that required open source solutions?

In any commercial transaction, the buyer must be free to set the terms of the sale. In the case of public agencies, that buyers is ultimately the government. If the government wants to buy, say, combat boots that are built to certain specifications, manufacturers who cannot meet those requirements should not whine about limited market access. They should just build better boots.

If the government wants to save on licensing fees by going open source, nobody, least of all software companies with vested interests, should be able to stop them from doing so. Nor should the US government, which itself uses open source software, buy into this rubbish that doing so somehow corrodes intellectual property rights. That’s just silly.

The great Facebook log-in fiasco

2010-02-23T08:24:00Z

A FUNNY thing happened on the way to the Facebook log-in page. Earlier this month, hundreds of users wanting to log into Facebook got “lost” and stumbled into a technology blog instead that had just written about the social networking site. And they couldn’t tell the difference.

Now anyone who follows this column knows I am not the biggest Facebook fan. I’ve always felt it imprudent to post personal information on the Internet, including photographs, for the whole world to see. At the same time, I found the “games” that Facebook uses to lure people in an insipid waste of time.

But the recent events at the technology blog ReadWriteWeb (http://www.readwriteweb.com) confirmed, albeit accidentally, my notion of the type of people Facebook attracts. I’m afraid the picture is not too flattering.

It began with Mike Melanson’s post entitled “Facebook Wants to Be Your One True Login,” which warned about the impact of Facebook’s recent alliance with AOL.

The partnership will enable AIM’s 17 million users to import their Facebook friends as instant messaging contacts and allow chat directly between the two services.
“The partnership reinforces the idea that our Facebook profile is at the center of our online existence.” Melanson wrote. “Whether or not someone is signed into AOL is no longer what’s at stake here, it’s whether or not the user is logged into Facebook.”

The point was valid, but neither Melanson nor ReadWriteWeb were ready for what happened next.

“Within a half an hour of posting, the number of visitors had skyrocketed, Melanson writes in a subsequent post. “It looked like a real winner. An hour later, it had reached the number of visitors an average post might see in an entire day. I figured I’d hit a home run.

“But then the comments started rolling in.”

Here are just a few examples:

“When can we log in?” asked one commenter.

“I WANT THE OLD FAFEBOOK BACK THIS SH-- IS WACK!!!!!” complained the next.

“This is such a mess I can’t do a thing on my facebook. The changes you have made are ridiculous,I can’t even login!!!!!I am very upset!!!”

In all, more than 800 comments were posted, most of them by users who were angry and frustrated that they could not get into their Facebook accounts.

Eventually, it became clear what had happened. The Facebook users weren’t typing in the URL into their browsers; they were typing “Facebook log-in” into Google. Inexplicably, the search engine put the ReadWriteWeb article above the most logical result, Facebook’s log-in page. (Over the weekend, the ReadWriteWeb article was still the second top link in Google’s search result.)

Just as inexplicably, the users who followed the link couldn’t tell they weren’t on Facebook, despite the bright red banner on the top of the page that said “ReadWriteWeb.” In fact, many of them mistook the page as yet another Facebook redesign.

“I just want to log in to Facebook - what with the red color and all? LOLLLOLOL!!!!!” one user wrote.

Others, who understood what was going on, mocked the Facebook users.

“This is what happens when people use Google to enter sites instead of typing it on their address bar… Damn you all Farmville users,” one reader wrote.

In the aftermath of the log-in mess, Melanson writes that Google had failed its users by misdirecting them to ReadWriteWeb. But this is only partially true. The first failure of the day was the lack of intelligence on the part of the Facebook users, who weren’t even smart enough to tell they were at the wrong site. We can blame this on a number of factors―poor education, a lack of understanding of the way the Internet works, and plain laziness come to mind―but we can hardly blame these on the search engine.

What is unfortunate is that in the navel-gazing that followed the ReadWriteWeb incident, some folks are suggesting that this was somehow a failure in the design of browsers and operating system, and how both might be rewritten to accommodate the great Facebook unwashed.

This, in fact, was the theme of one discussion on the Ubuntu UK podcast.

“There are people out there who don’t know the difference between URL and searching and getting to a Web site and how to navigate the Web,” one of the hosts said. “More importantly, this is our target audience for Ubuntu, and are we ready for these people and are we doing the right thing to tailor what we do for that kind of user, because that’s what they’re like.”

As an Ubuntu user since 2006, I find it atrocious that my operating system of choice will somehow be dumbed down to accommodate people who tell the difference between one Web site and the next, much less spell ("WHY IS THIS HAPPENING PLZ LET ME ON FACEBOK MY GIRLFRIEND IS GONA BE MAD IF I DONT WRITE OWN HER WALL"). Being user-friendly is one thing; but the notion that we must over-simplify the user interface to adjust to the lowest common denominator is plain silly.

One of the top TV shows in the country today is a puerile game show in which a no-talent host doles out scads of money while scantily clad women gyrate at every opportunity. Is this drivel what all TV shows must aspire to become, simply because it is the most popular? And do we necessarily have to tailor all television programming to reach its intellectually challenged viewers? I hope not.

Get out of my face

2010-02-16T10:01:00Z

HOW do you write about technology and opt out on the latest social networking craze? Simple, just say “no.”

Last week, when Gmail popped up a screen announcing Google Buzz, I viewed this as yet another annoying attempt by some company to benefit from a online community I would help create with content that cost them next to nothing. You know, just like Facebook.

“Share updates, photos, videos, and more. Start conversations about the things you find interesting,” the announcement said. Not interested, I ignored the large blue button that said “Sweet! Check out the Buzz!” and clicked on the tiny link that said “Nah, go to my inbox” instead.

Even though I ignored it, Buzz took its place as a link on Gmail’s main menu, right between Inbox and Starred. To give it the Zombieland double tap, I scrolled down to the bottom of the page and clicked on the link that said “turn off buzz.”

As it turned out, this was the prudent thing to do. People who thought, “sweet,” and decided to take the plunge and check out Buzz got more than they wanted.
For one thing, Buzz automatically created a circle of friends from a user’s most frequent e-mail and chat contacts, and made them visible to anyone who viewed the user’s profile.

“I use my private Gmail account to email my boyfriend and my mother,” one angry blogger wrote in an entry called “F--- you, Google.”

“There’s a BIG drop-off between them and my other ‘most frequent’ contacts. You know who my third most frequent contact is? My abusive ex-husband.”

“F--- you, Google. My privacy concerns are not trite. They are linked to my actual physical safety…

You have destroyed over 10 years of my goodwill and adoration, just so you could try and out-MySpace MySpace.”

Ironically, although the blogger has since password-protected her blog, the entry is still accessible--through Google’s cache. Score another point for invasion of privacy.
The real-life implications of others being able to see your frequent e-mail contacts are huge. For example, your boss could easily discover that you correspond with competitors who are trying to pirate you. Or, if you’re a journalist, Buzz could expose your confidential sources.

In a blog post Saturday, Todd Jackson, product manager for Gmail and Google Buzz, apologized for endangering users’ privacy.

“We’re very sorry for the concern we’ve caused and have been working hard ever since to improve things based on your feedback,” Jackson wrote.

Not even a week after the new feature was launched, Google said it would turn off auto-following on Buzz, and would merely suggest contacts for users to follow.

“You won’t be set up to follow anyone until you have reviewed the suggestions and clicked ‘Follow selected people and start using Buzz,’” Jackson said.
Second, Buzz will no longer connect public Picasa Web Albums and shared items on Google Reader automatically, Jackson said, addressing another privacy sore point.
Third, Google would add a Buzz tab to Gmail Settings from which users will be able to hide Buzz from Gmail or disable it completely.

Robin Wauters in TechCrunch writes that the flareup over privacy should have been anticipated.

“Merging something designed for public broadcasting (Buzz) with something inherently private (Gmail) was just looking for trouble,” Wauters says. “Google is – deservedly – getting a lot of heat for the fact that its latest social product has a number of privacy flaws baked into it by design… They’ve since made some improvements to the product, but that’s not where the story ends.”

In this, of course, Wauters is correct, not just about Google Buzz but about other social networking sites, too.

Sadly, Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg was half right when he said the loss of privacy is becoming a social norm. What Zuckerberg didn’t say was that companies like his and Google are largely responsible by making such a loss of privacy easy when they use an opt-out approach that assumes we want to share our personal information, rather than an opt-in approach that first asks our permission to do so.

And even if you opt out, someone will eventually pull you in. Even the famous author and recluse, J.D. Salinger who died last month at the age of 91, has a Facebook page. The page is a fake, of course, but it’s quite the ironic reminder of how intrusive social networking has become.

Google, don’t be evil

2010-02-09T01:57:00Z

ONE of the cool things about Google is its informal motto, “Don’t be evil.”

“Googlers generally apply those words to how we serve our users,” the company says in its Code of Conduct. “But ‘Don’t be evil’ is much more than that. Yes, it’s about providing our users unbiased access to information, focusing on their needs and giving them the best products and services that we can. But it’s also about doing the right thing more generally—following the law, acting honorably and treating each other with respect.”

When Google was still an upstart, “Don’t be evil” was a jab at its more established competitors, who were seen to be exploiting their users, said Paul Buchheit, a former employee who suggested the motto in a 2000 meeting on company values. Microsoft, which used its dominance in operating systems to stifle competition, surely comes to mind.

But now a decade later, Google is a dominant force on the Internet. Is it beginning to look like the new Microsoft?

In a thoughtful piece entitled “Google’s Microsoft Moment,” Anil Dash, an expert on Web technology and culture, said the era of Google as a trusted, ‘non-evil’ startup whose actions are automatically assumed to be benevolent is over. In fact, he said, some notable trends inside the company could cause it to compromise its stated values and cause people to think Google was beginning to act “evil” like many other large corporations.

In his July 2009 blog entry, Dash cited Google’s tendency to develop mobile applications only for its Android operating system instead of the more popular iPhone, forgetting that “they have to go where the users are.”
The launch of Chrome OS, he adds, gives the company two operating systems instead of one, reminiscent of Microsoft in the 1990s, which had to support Windows NT, Windows 2000, Windows 95, 98 and ME.
“I know Google is convinced its employees are smarter than everyone else in the world, but this is a product management problem, not a computer science problem,” Dash wrote.

Outside the company, there is a growing public perception that Google is a powerful monopoly that will flex its muscles when it suits its financial interests, motto be damned. Its ambitious book-scanning project, for example, has triggered opposition not only from authors and publishers, but also from the US Justice Department and foreign governments for giving one company too much control over an invaluable cultural resource.

Google’s foray into Web browsing in 2008 was widely portrayed in the press as a challenge to Microsoft’s Internet Explorer, but it also carried the whiff of a corporate giant no longer satisfied with dominating online search. On a gut level, I have resisted using Google Chrome because I already rely heavily on Google for search and Web mail. I don’t want to give the same company complete control over my browser as well.
Beyond that, Chrome calls into question the company’s commitment to open source projects such as Mozilla Firefox. For the last few years, Mozilla has been getting 85 percent to 90 percent of its revenues from Google by making it the default search engine on Firefox. The deal runs through 2011--but that could easily change after that.

More recently, Google-owned YouTube launched an experimental program that enabled users to watch streaming videos without having to install the troublesome Adobe Flash plug-in. Instead, the videos use HTML5, a standard being built into new browsers, including the latest version of Firefox. Yet when the experimental service was launched, YouTube listed these supported browsers: Google Chrome (of course), Apple Safari, and Microsoft Internet Explorer with Chrome Frame installed. Firefox users were very plainly left out.

As it turns out, Firefox is not supported because it doesn’t use the proprietary H.264 video codec that Google seems to be pushing. Considering how dominant YouTube is in its own niche, its support for a non-open video standard would prove ruinous to Firefox in the long run, as users who want to watch streaming videos switch to YouTube-supported browsers. Who would benefit from this fallout? Google Chrome.

As a Linux user, I’ve always felt that Google talks a good open-source game, relying on the vibrant community of developers to push projects such as Android and Chrome forward, yet it is extremely proprietary in other ways. Its search technology, of course, has always been proprietary. But now Google seems to be making choices that “do evil” to open-source users and developers.

In his column “The Open Road,” Matt Assay notes that as Google pursues its corporate objectives, it may end up stepping on its erstwhile partners and could pursue policies, including software patents, that threaten the open-source community just as much as Microsoft has.

“Google is powerful, but it still needs friends,” writes Assay. “Open source has been a chief ally of Google to date. Will it remain such? That’s an open question.”

Cloud storage

2010-02-01T22:21:00Z

THERE’S a lot of talk about cloud storage these days, which is just a fancy term for online storage. The idea of saving files on a remote server and accessing them from any machine with an Internet connection isn’t new. That’s been around since file hosting services from the early days of the Web. What’s new is that online storage is becoming more ubiquitous and more convenient, with services that automatically synchronize content on your local drive with a virtual drive on the Internet and a variety of devices.

A good example of this type of cloud storage is Dropbox (http://www.dropbox.com). First released in 2008, Dropbox now has an estimated 4 million users.

Registering for a free account gets you 2 gibabytes of online storage; paid accounts let you store 50GB for $9.99 a month or 100GB for $19.99 a month.

While you can upload and download files from any browser, the service truly shines when you install the Dropbox client, which is available for Linux, Mac OS, Windows and the iPhone. This will enable you to drag and drop any file into your designated Dropbox folder that is then automatically synchronized to the Web and to any other computers on which you’ve installed the client.

For example, I’ve set up Dropbox on my home PC (running Ubuntu Linux 9.10), a Macbook and an Acer netbook (also running Ubuntu) so that I can access my important files no matter which machine I’m using. If I had a Windows PC or an Apple iPhone, I could set them up in the same way. All synchronization is done automatically in the background, so you will hardly notice Dropbox while you’re doing something else on your PC.

You can share your Dropbox files by putting them in a public folder or create shared folders. Dropbox enables you to control who can access your shared folders, including the ability to kick people out and remove the shared files from their computes.

Multi-platform support and ease of use make Dropbox an outstanding cloud storage service, but it’s not by any means the only game in town.
Another excellent multi-platform service is ZumoDrive (http://www.zumodrive.com), which was released just last year.

A free account gives you 1GB of storage but if you go through a set of tutorials on the Zumo Dojo (log into your account on the Web site and choose the Dojo tab), you can earn another gigabyte free. Pricing on its 50GB and100GB is the same as Dropbox, but ZumoDrive also offers cheaper plans: $2.99 a month for 10GB and $6.99 a month for 25GB.

Also like Dropbox, ZumoDrive comes with a desktop client that is available on Linux (Ubuntu and Red Hat), Windows, Mac OS and the iPhone. A client for Google Android phones will soon be available, the company says.

Unlike Dropbox, which stores all files in each local device on which it is installed, ZumoDrive keeps files on the remote server but makes them appear local. ZumoDrive appears as an external drive that you can browse in Explorer, Finder or Nautilus, depending on your operating system, and will stream music or video files as if they were stored on your local drive. This approach means that you can store your 30GB iTunes library on ZumoDrive and make each song available on your netbook, even if it has only 8GB of storage.

On the other hand, ZumoDrive is smart enough to keep a copy of your most frequently used files on your local drive as well, so they are available even when you’re not online. ZumoDrive also allows you to selectively synchronize individual files, folders or the entire virtual drive.

Another cool feature is the ability to link folders to ZumoDrive and have the contents of those folders automatically sychronized every there is a change. Linking is easy: simply right-click on the folder and choose the “Link to ZumoDrive” entry in the context menu.

Files in our ZumoDrive can be shared by posting links to individual files or folders or creating shared folders.

If you are an Ubuntu user, you can also use Ubuntu One (https://one.ubuntu.com/), which like Dropbox gives you 2GB free. A paid $10 a month account gives you 50GB of storage. Like Dropbox, Ubuntu One keeps copies of your files on the Web server as well as on each local device on which you install the client. Synchronization is done in the background, too. If you use Tomboy, a wiki-style notepad, you can have Ubuntu One synchronize your notes across different Ubuntu PCs. Canonical, the commercial sponsor of Ubuntu, says it will encourage third-party development of Windows, Mac OS X and iPhone clients for its service.

Need even more free storage? Considering signing up for Microsoft’s SkyDrive (http://skydrive.live.com/) , a basic Web-based service that gives you a generous 25GB of online storage. To gain some of the functionality of Dropbox or ZumoDrive, download the free SkyDrive Explorer utility (http://skydriveexplorer.com) and see your SkyDrive as another folder in Windows Explorer. The only catch: the utility is only available on Windows.

Protecting online freedom

2010-01-25T08:14:00Z

THE recent exchange of harsh words between Washington and Beijing highlights a major concern for Internet users all over the world. How this debate plays out in their own countries will determine how free individuals are to express themselves online.

The latest controversy springs from US Secretary of State Hillary Clinton’s landmark speech in support of Internet freedom as a part of American foreign policy.
In her talk at the Newseum in Washington D.C., Clinton pointed to renewed threats to the free flow of information, citing Internet censorship in China, Vietnam, Saudi Arabia, Egypt, Tunisia and Uzbekistan.

These activities, she said, were diametrically opposed to the United States’ vision of “a single Internet where all of humanity has equal access to knowledge and ideas.”
The US, she said, sees an urgent need to protect individual freedoms – including freedom of expression – on the digital frontiers of the 21st Century.

“This freedom is no longer defined solely by whether citizens can go into the town square and criticize their government without fear of retribution. Blogs, e-mail, social networks, and text messages have opened up new forums for exchanging ideas—and created new targets for censorship,” she said.

“As I speak to you today, government censors are working furiously to erase my words from the records of history. But history itself has already condemned these tactics.”

Clearly referring to China, she continued:

“Some countries have erected electronic barriers that prevent their people from accessing portions of the world’s networks. They have expunged words, names and phrases from search engine results. They have violated the privacy of citizens who engage in non-violent political speech. These actions contravene the Universal Declaration on Human Rights, which tells us that all people have the right ‘to seek, receive and impart information and ideas through any media and regardless of frontiers.’ With the spread of these restrictive practices, a new information curtain is descending across much of the world.”

Clinton also talked about the freedom to connect.

“Governments should not prevent people from connecting to the Internet, to Web sites, or to each other,” she said. “The freedom to connect is like the freedom of assembly in cyberspace.”

Finally, Clinton suggested that freedom online wasn’t just good policy, it’s good business, too.

“To use market terminology, a publicly-listed company in Tunisia or Vietnam that operates in an environment of censorship will always trade at a discount relative to an identical firm in a free society,” Clinton said. “If corporate decision makers don’t have access to global sources of news and information, investors will have less confidence in their decisions. Countries that censor news and information must recognize that, from an economic standpoint, there is no distinction between censoring political speech and commercial speech. If businesses in your nation are denied access to either type of information, it will inevitably reduce growth.”

As an example, Clinton cited Google’s recent announcement that it would pull out of China unless it stopped censoring search results. She also urged the Chinese government to investigate reports that hackers, exploiting a security hole in Microsoft’s Internet Explorer browser, were able to hack into the Google Mail accounts of human rights activists protesting Chinese policies.

“The Internet has already been a source of tremendous progress in China, and it’s great that so many people there are now online,” she said. “But countries that restrict free access to information or violate the basic rights of internet users risk walling themselves off from the progress of the next century.”

China reacted angrily to Clinton’s speech, denying any state involvement in the Google attacks and urging the United States to stop using “so-called Internet freedom to make groundless attacks on China.” A foreign ministry spokesman added that “China has its own national situation, culture and tradition” and administers the Internet according to the law, “which is in line with the practice adopted worldwide.”

Sadly, this is an argument we are likely to hear, not only from China, but also from other countries that practice censorship.

Aside from China, Burma, Cuba, Egypt, Iran, North Korea, Saudi Arabia, Syria, Tunisia, Turkmenistan, Uzbekistan and Vietnam “actively and aggressively” censor the Internet, the press freedom watchdog group Reporters Without Borders said in its March 2009 report.

Other countries, including Australia, Malaysia, South Korea, Sri Lanka, and Thailand were also in the group’s watch list.

Often, censorship will come in the guise of “protecting” citizens from the evils of pornography, the stated purpose of a new draft law in Italy, which wants to vet videos before they are uploaded to the Web. Australia, too, plans to install Internet filters this year. Even in the Philippines, in the wake of the Katrina Halili sex scandal last year, there was talk of Internet censorship.

A bill in Congress, Cybercrime Prevention Act of 2009, seeks to create a new body, whose job it is “to prepare and implement appropriate and effective measures to prevent and suppress cybercrime” such as cybersex, child pornography and spam. The bill does not specifically mention Internet filters, but it’s conceivable that these might be used and justified on the basis of suppressing cybercrimes.

The problem with such measures, however, is that they involve some central authority telling us what we can read or view, and controlling what we can say. It might be about sex today, but could easily become about religion or politics tomorrow.

And, unlike libel laws that punish the guilty only after the a defamatory statement has been made, filters and other such censorship measures that seek to suppress content are a form of prior restraint that prevent an idea from being expressed – and that is the end of free speech.

Facebook: What privacy?

2010-01-18T03:01:00Z

DO you have a Facebook account?

It seems like every dog and his brother is on the world’s biggest social networking site these days. Facebook happily reports that it has more than 350 million active users. Of these, about 8.4 million are from the Philippines, which makes it the ninth biggest country in terms of Facebook users, says Nick Burcher, who has tracked usage statistics since 2008. In Asia, only Indonesia, with 14.7 million users, is bigger than we are, according to the December 2009 figures. The biggest country, by far, is the United States, of course, with 101.3 million users.

Surrounded by so many millions of Facebook users, I sometimes feel a bit of a Luddite for steadfastly refusing to hop on the bandwagon.

I refuse on the grounds that outside a small circle of family and friends, there are very few people with whom I want to share any kind of personal information: how old I am, what school I attended, or who my other friends are. Nor do I want the world to see some unflattering photo that someone took at the company Christmas party.
The dangers of exposing personal information to complete strangers seems self-evident, yet I am constantly surprised at how people don’t give this much thought when they start posting family photos on Facebook.

Risk No. 1: There are unsavory characters online – identity thieves, sexual predators, and marketing types come to mind – who prowl Facebook and other social networking sites. They don’t want to be your friends; they want to use and abuse you. Why make it easy for them?

Risk No. 2: If you’re not careful, you risk exposing some indiscretion or some embarrassing opinion or detail about yourself that you will regret later. It might have seemed hilarious at the time to post that photo of you in drag on Facebook, but your prospective school or employer who surfs social networking sites to screen applicants might not be overly impressed. And even if you sober up and remove the photo later, chances are someone has already picked it up and posted it elsewhere. In fact, it might pop up the next time you Google your name.

But hang on. Don’t you control what others can see on Facebook?

Well, yes.... and no.

Facebook announced a new privacy policy last Dec. 9 that is clearly intended to push people toward sharing even more of their data with the public. For example, its new “recommended” settings share the content they post to Facebook, such as status messages and wall posts, with everyone on the Internet.
Under the new policy, Facebook also treats your personal information – your name, profile picture, current city, gender, networks, and the pages that you are a “fan” of ― as publicly available information.

“Before, users were allowed to restrict access to much of that information,” says the Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF), an Internet watchdog group. “Now, however, those privacy options have been eliminated. For example, although you used to have the ability to prevent everyone but your friends from seeing your friends list, that old privacy setting ― shown below ― has now been removed completely from the privacy settings page.”

By now, the new rules are starting to look like an anti-privacy policy. But there’s more.

Facebook previously allowed users who didn’t want their information shared with application developers over the Facebook Platform (including the makers of that insipid, time-wasting farm game) the option of telling Facebook to “not share any information about me through the Facebook API [application programming interface.”
That option has disappeared, the EFF says, and now faceless developers and entrepreneurs, about 1 million of them, can suck up all of your “publicly available information” whenever a friend of yours adds an application.

Under fire for the anti-privacy settings, here’s what Mark Zuckerberg, the 25-year-old founder and chief executive of Facebook had to say.
“In the last five or six years, blogging has taken off in a huge way and all these different services that have people sharing all this information,” Zuckerberg told TechCrunch.

“People have really gotten comfortable not only sharing more information and different kinds, but more openly and with more people. That social norm is just something that has evolved over time.

“We view it as our role in the system to constantly be innovating and be updating what our system is to reflect what the current social norms are.
“A lot of companies would be trapped by the conventions and their legacies of what they’ve built, doing a privacy change - doing a privacy change for 350 million users is not the kind of thing that a lot of companies would do. But we viewed that as a really important thing, to always keep a beginner’s mind and what would we do if we were starting the company now and we decided that these would be the social norms now and we just went for it.”

Translation: We at Facebook know you no longer value your privacy, so stop whining and start sharing so we can start making some money.

My status message to Facebook: Thanks, but no thanks.

Ubuntu for Windows users

2010-01-11T09:46:00Z

QUESTIONS that I get in the mail show that quite a number of Windows users are curious about what to expect when they make the jump to Linux.
While answering one such question this week, I realized that I’ve already written quite a bit about how things are done in Linux as opposed to Windows, but that these snippets were scattered over many columns over the last three years. I thought it might be useful to gather that information in one column, where it might help more Windows users to make the switch to Ubuntu Linux.

Watching DVDs
Rolfe Pope writes: “I am curious if you are still just a Linux person, how do you watch commercial movie DVDs?”
Normally, of course, I simply pop the DVD into my NextBase player and watch the movie on my 42-inch Phillips LCD TV. On those occasions that I do want to view a DVD on my Ubuntu PC, however, I usually use the VLC player, which can play almost anything that moves. (See the next part to find out how to install VLC and other software packages.)

The second part of Rolfe’s question, however, hints at some previous experience with Linux, as he asks about codecs, or the coding-decoding software needed to play various types of video files. Fortunately, installing these codecs has been simplified in Ubuntu 9.10 or Karmic Koala. Simply go to the Ubuntu Software Center and install Ubuntu restricted extras. Or, if you prefer, open up Terminal and cut and paste this line:

sudo apt-get install ubuntu-restricted-extras

Installing software
Unlike Windows, you will not have to buy and install an office suite separately. OpenOffice is already installed when you install Ubuntu.
In Windows, you install new software by downloading and running a .exe file. Or, the .exe file might come in a CD that you bought from a store. In Ubuntu, most applications (called packages) are free, and you can download them and install them from a menu (Applications > Ubuntu Software Center from the top panel). More experienced users might prefer to use Synaptic (System > Administration > Synaptic Package Manager) of the Terminal (Linux’s version of the DOS shell) to install programs.

Before installing any software, you must enter the password you created when you first installed Ubuntu. This simple precaution and the way software is distributed in general make it much more difficult for you to accidentally install a virus.
There’s a bus load of free software available. The Ubuntu Software Center lists more than 2,000 applications. It costs you nothing to try them out, and they’re easy to uninstall if you don’t like them.

Finding your files
Coming from Windows, you may find the absence of drive letters discomfiting. But once you understand how a Linux system is organized, you should have no problem finding your files.

On Ubuntu, the equivalent of Windows Explorer is called Nautilus. You can launch it by going to Places > Home Folder. The home folder is the one with your user name on it, and is roughly equivalent to My Documents in Windows. It should not be confused with /home, which is where everyone’s home folder (in a shared multi-user system) goes. So, if your user name is “bill,” your home folder would be /home/bill. If you shared the machine with Ted, his home folder would be /home/ted.
In Linux, you can hide a folder or a file by starting its name with a period. To see hidden folders, go to View in Nautilus and check Show Hidden Files.
If you have more than one hard drive, it will show up in Places. When you use it for the first time, Ubuntu will ask you for your password before it mounts the drive to make it accessible.

USB drives are normally detected when they’re plugged in, and Nautilus will automatically show you the contents of the drive.

Burning CDs
Gnomebaker is the default CD burner installed with Ubuntu, but there are other choices. In the Ubuntu Software Center, you can find Brasero. Xfburn, X-CD-Roast and the one I prefer, K3B. To turn audio CD tracks into MP3 files, you can use Audio CD Extractor and to rip DVDs, you can use AcidRip.

Do you have a Windows-to-Ubuntu question? Drop me a line.

Doing more with your Ubuntu PC

2010-01-04T09:59:01Z

My webcam captures motion and takes time-stamped shots.

FOR more than three years, I’ve been using Ubuntu, a popular distribution of Linux, on my home PC for work and play. As a long-time Windows user, I appreciated the freedom from crashes and system slowdowns that plagued my computing life before I made the switch. The notion that I would have to reinstall my operating system, so common in Windows when something went terribly awry, now seems so foreign to me as a Linux user.

I also enjoyed not having to put up with Microsoft’s intrusive and heavy-handed licensing practices, and not worrying that some malicious piece of code would get past my anti-virus software and wreak havoc on my files.

Like others who made the leap to Linux, I learned to use free alternatives to common Windows applications. For word processing, spreadsheets and presentations, there was OpenOffice in lieu of MS Office. For Photoshop, there was Gimp. To watch videos, I used VLC, a superior alternative to Windows Media Player; to listen to music, I used XMMS (now Audacious), which looked a lot like Winamp. For instant messaging, I used Pidgin instead of Windows Messenger, Yahoo Messenger or Gtalk. To download music, I used Frostwire, and to pull in larger files, I used Deluge, a BitTorrent client comparable to uTorrent. The only thing I didn’t need was an alternative anti-virus program; there just aren’t that many viruses out there that can hurt a Linux system.

This week, just as I felt I had done everything I wanted to do, I found two more ways to use my Ubuntu PC. What follows is a little more technical than I usually get, but it’s really not that hard to follow.

Set up a simple surveillance system using a USB Web camera. To do this, you need a USB webcam and a command-line program called Motion, which you can install from the Synaptic Package Manager (System > Administration).

Next, you’ll need to create a hidden folder called .motion in your home folder. To do this, launch Terminal (Applications > Accessories) and cut and paste this line onto it and hit Enter.

mkdir .motion

Cut and past the next line to copy the configuration file that Motion will use into the hidden folder you’ve just created:

sudo cp /etc/motion/motion.conf ./.motion

Then enter this line to change ownership of the configuration file to you (replace the to your name (the one in your Home folder):

sudo chown ./.motion/motion.conf

You can edit the configuration file to change how Motion behaves, but with any luck, it should work without any alterations. Make sure your webcam is plugged in and type “motion” (without the quotes) into Terminal and hit enter. You’ll see a few messages scroll by in the Terminal window, and you’ll know you’re successful if you see this line: “Started stream webcam server in port 8081.”
At this point, it might look like nothing is happening, but Motion is actually waiting to detect movement through the webcam. To confirm your webcam is working with Motion, go to this address in your browser: http://localhost:8081/
If all goes well, you’ll see a live feed from your webcam. Motion will take time-stamped snapshots every time it detects movement, and save the files into a directory called “/tmp/motion.” Motion also creates a Shockwave Flash that you can play back using VLC. You can change where the program stores these files by using a text editor such as Gedit to edit the motion.conf file in the .motion folder. Find the target_dir setting and change “/tmp/motion” to any folder you like.
On my setup, I changed the target directory to my Ubuntu One folder, which is automatically backed up to a server on the Internet, so I can view them even when I’m not home.
As a footnote to my security camera explorations, I found a much more sophisticated program called Zoneminder that uses a browser interface to control up to four cameras. Unfortunately, despite my best efforts, I couldn’t get it to read my webcam.

Use my Ubuntu PC to control my mobile phone. On the Mac, I use an excellent program called BluePhoneElite ($24.95), which lets me control my Sony Ericsson phone using a Bluetooth connection to my Macbook. SMS messages pop up on the Mac while its connected to the phone, and I can reply to them on my notebook. This beats thumb-typing any day.
The closest I came to this on Linux was Wammu, which was surprisingly easy to set up, once I paired my phone to my PC (System > Preferences > Bluetooth), using a cheap USB Bluetooth dongle from CDR King. Once you’ve added your phone using the phone wizard, you can connect it (Phone > Connect) and retrieve your contacts and messages so that they’ll be available on the PC. Wammu will let you read and send SMS messages, but unlike BluePhoneElite, will not pop up new messages. A workaround would have been to have an option to check messages at user-defined intervals the same way e-mail clients do, but Wammu won’t let you do this either. Still, just being able to type out and send an SMS message on your PC is worth the price of admission, which, in this case is free.

Firing Steve Ballmer

2009-12-27T22:00:00Z

Would you fire Steve Ballmer? » poll maker
Tags : ballmer

IF you were a Microsoft stockholder, would you fire Steve Ballmer?

Newsweek predicts you will, just as Ballmer marks his 10th anniversary as chief executive at the software giant.

“Microsoft stock has dropped by nearly 50 percent on his watch, lagging not just other tech companies but even the Dow Jones industrial average,” the magazine says in its Tech Predictions for 2010. “Distracted by the Windows Vista fiasco, Ballmer has missed every big new tech market of the past decade. Google won the race for Internet search and keyword advertising. Apple won in MP3 players and online music sales, and now holds the high ground in mobile phones, while Windows Mobile fades away. Microsoft’s Zune music player is a dud. Bing, Microsoft’s search engine, will never catch Google.”

“He’s a screamer and a bit of a bully--not the easiest guy to work for. If Microsoft were any other company, this guy would be in trouble,” Newsweek continued. “Investors must be getting restless. Soon they’ll start calling for a shake-up.”

Adding insult to injury, the Harvard Business Review released its list of 100 Best-Performing CEOs shortly Newsweek’s prediction, giving the top spot to Steve Jobs of Apple.

The list, whittled down from 2,000 chief executives of publicly traded companies worldwide, also included John Chambers of Cisco at No. 4; Jeff Bezoz of Amazon at No. 7; and Eric Schmidt of Google at No. 9. Even Margaret Whitman of eBay (No. 8) and John Thompson of Symantec (No. 19) made it to the list. Ballmer didn’t.

To be fair, it should be pointed CEOs of other high-profile technology companies didn’t make it to the list either, including HP’s Mark Hurd and Intel’s Paul Otellini. (Bill Gates, under whose shadow Ballmer toils, and Oracle’s Larry Ellison didn’t make it to the list because the Review considered only chief executives who took the leadership role between January 1995 and December 2007.)

Still, it’s got to hurt to be nowhere on the list when your two fiercest competitors, Apple and Google, are so prominently positioned.

Then, a few days before Christmas, more bad news.

A US federal appeals court upheld a $290 million judgment against Microsoft Corp. and ordered it to stop selling MS Word unless it removed code that violated the software patent of an obscure Canadian company, i4i, that sued it in Texas and won.

The ruling is ironic, given Microsoft’s use of software patents earlier this year to bludgeon TomTom, a Dutch maker of car navigation systems, into settling over its use of the Linux kernel. Ballmer has bellicosely proclaimed that the kernel violates several Microsoft’s patents and has threatened to sue developers and users alike over its use. The company’s suit against TomTom in February was the first time it tried to enforce these patents against the Linux platform.

In his post “10 Things Microsoft Did Wrong in 2010,” Joe Wilcox of Betanews observed many of the things Newsweek did and highlighted the departure of key personnel, including the company’s chief financial officer, Chris Lidell, and Don Dodge, its start-up evangelist, who was laid off along with 5,000 other employees in January. Two months later, Dodge took a job with Google.

Is it time for Microsoft to jettison Ballmer?

Mary-Jo Foley, who has followed Microsoft for the last decade, doesn’t think so. Calling the Newsweek prediction “click-bait, pure and simple,” she says she’s 99.99 percent sure it’s “out and out wrong.”

Her reasons:

Ballmer did some good things, too, like firing 5,000 people and cutting costs to please Wall Street, escaped the big mistake of buying Yahoo, and overseeing the release of Windows 7, which was generally well received.

But her biggest reason, it seems, is this: Gates, Ballmer’s buddy, doesn’t want to fire him, and Microsoft has nobody else in-house to replace him anyway. Not exactly a ringing vote of confidence, but if you’re having a bad year-end, I guess it’s better than nothing.

In an interview with the Seattle P-I, Google’s Dodge likened his former company, Microsoft, to IBM in 1985 – losing its innovative edge after 20 years.

Another factor, he says, is Gates’ departure in 2008. “The transition was smooth, but not having Bill there every day has far-reaching implications,” Dogde said.

To Ballmer’s credit, Dodge adds: “Failures are open to debate and I’d rather not talk about them. One thing I will say: Steve Ballmer never gives up. He keeps coming, and coming, and coming. So, anything you might classify as a failure today ... don’t be surprised if they eventually turn it around and make it successful.”

So, what do you think? If he keeps at it, will Ballmer get this leadership thing right one of these days?

A good year for desktop Linux

2009-12-21T11:11:00Z

2010 is going to be a good year for Linux on the desktop.

No, tens of millions of Windows users aren’t going to see the light and suddenly switch. Inertia and resistance to change make a massive migration highly unlikely. At the same time, Microsoft has managed to stem the erosion from its Vista-fueled disaster, first by extending the commercial life of Windows XP on netbooks, then by releasing Windows 7.

On the other hand, there is no doubt that Linux will continue to make steady gains on the desktop next year, even though most estimates still put its market share at about only 2 percent.

Public awareness of a viable and free alternative to Windows and Mac OS X is growing, thanks in part to netbooks that brought Linux to the mass market, and the media hype over Google’s Chrome operating system.

Also, from the standpoint of usability, Linux on the desktop is improving so rapidly that it’s likely that many Windows users who do try it will never look back.

As the new year approaches, a number of developments bear watching.

Ubuntu, one of the most popular Linux distributions, will continue to get better and gain more users as it heads into its next major update, 10.4, in April. The news last week that Mark Shuttleworth would step down as chief executive of Canonical, the commercial sponsor of Ubuntu, is positive because it will free him up to focus on improving product design and quality.

“I will focus on my passions of product design and development. I want Ubuntu to succeed as the open platform of choice for almost all use types whether on netbook, notebook, desktop, server, embedded device or wherever people compute,” Shuttleworth writes in the company blog.

“I am more committed now than I have ever been. This is all about focus. I will continue to be engaged, will fund the project as needed, and have the opportunity now to focus on the areas where I can make the biggest impact.”

He continues: “I will also spend more time talking to and visiting partners and customers about what they demand from an open platform and feeding that back into the product through the community and Canonical.”

My take: expect Shuttleworth to push more deals in which Ubuntu will come factory-installed on desktop and notebook PCs from vendors such as HP, Dell and Asian manufacturers.

Of course, Ubuntu isn’t the only Linux game in town.

We are likely to see netbooks powered by Google Chrome in the second half of 2010. Curiously, Canonical is working under contract with Google to develop Chrome and sees the entry of the search giant as a positive development for Linux on the desktop.

Meanwhile, one recent study disputes Microsoft’s claim of owning 93 percent of the netbook market. ABI Research projects that 32 percent of the 35 million netbooks sold this year already run on Linux, most of which were shipped outside the United States.

Ubuntu, Intel’s Moblin and Google’s Android and Chrome OS are likely to lead the way next year, and the increasing sales of ARM-based netbooks will continue to push up the share of Linux, especially in less developed countries. ABI projects that Linux will overtake Windows on netbooks by 2013.

Elsewhere, Linux desktop development continues. The Novell-backed OpenSuse 11.2 was released last month, a week after Mandriva was made available in its final 2010.0 form. The newest versions of Linux Mint (based on Ubuntu) and Fedora (sponsored by Red Hat) were also released in the same month.

Writing in TechRepublic, Debra Shinder says Windows 7 will rule the desktop OS space in 2010. It’s an easy prediction to make, given that about 92 percent of users still run some version of Windows, and that the latest version corrects many of the problems that plagued Vista.

On the other hand, Microsoft’s pricing and restrictive licensing policies continue to make Windows unattractive to users who understand that they can get an equivalent or better operating system for free. More tech-savvy consumers, too, will realize that the “Starter Edition” of Windows 7 that is aimed at netbooks is really nothing more than good old-fashioned crippleware that nobody really wants. Those seem reason enough for some Windows users to consider making the leap to Linux.

Will 2010 be the year of the Linux desktop? Not for me. As far as I’m concerned, that milestone came and went in 2006, when I replaced my bug-infested Windows XP system at home with Ubuntu 6.06. Three years have passed, and I’ve never looked back. I’m betting more and more people will experience the same thing next year, making 2010 their year for desktop Linux.

Quick change artist

2009-12-14T03:01:00Z

ONE of things that might disconcert Windows users after they’ve switched to Ubuntu Linux is the frequency with which the operating system is updated.

There was a five-year wait between Windows XP and Windows Vista, and another two years until Windows 7 was released to fix all that was wrong with Vista.

In contrast, Ubuntu, one of the most popular flavors of Linux, has pretty much followed a six-month release cycle since it was first introduced in 2004. This means that every April and October (except in 2006 when Dapper Drake was released in June instead), a new version becomes available.

It’s only been a month since I installed the latest version, Karmic Koala, on my home PC and already, an early test version of the next release, Lucid Lynx, is available. The final version of Lucid isn’t due until April 2010 – but that’s not really too far away.

From the standpoint of an ordinary user, this kind of release schedule can seem rather disruptive. After all, who wants to install a new OS every six months, even if it is free?

Every new release carries the risk that a favorite application that worked perfectly before will no longer do so. Do we really want to take that risk every six months?

The resistance to too much change too soon is even more pronounced in a corporate setting, where IT departments don’t want to deal with new support, training and maintenance requirements every six months.

Fortunately, they don’t have to, and neither do you.

Just because a new version of an operating system is available doesn’t mean you must move to it. The choice is yours.

Until recently, I upgraded my Ubuntu PC only once a year, skipping every other release. I figured this would keep my system stable yet fairly up to date without too many disruptions (backing up my data, upgrading or doing a fresh install, then restoring my applications and data files).

This changed after Jaunty Jackalope (9.04) and Karmic Koala (9.10), two successive releases that I installed, not only because I was attracted to their new features but simply because they gave me something new to write about. For the same reasons, I will almost certainly install Lucid Lynx (10.4) when it comes out next April.

Canonical, the commercial sponsor of Ubuntu, seems to understand that there are two types of users: those who value stability and those who constantly want to try the latest technology. People who belong in the second camp can install every new release as it comes along. On the other hand, folks that need a little more stability can opt to install an Ubuntu edition with long-term support (LTS), which comes out every two years. Unlike standard releases that Canonical supports for 18 months, LTS releases are supported for three years on the desktop and five years on the server, and are updated every six months with “point releases.” The last LTS release was Hardy Heron (8.04); the next will be Lucid.

Frequent releases are challenging to developers as well, but they also have their benefits.

In his keynote at LinuxCon earlier this year, Canonical chief executive Mark Shuttleworth, spoke about how timed, predictable releases contribute to better free and open source software.

“The release itself is enormously energizing...the release is the beginning of the journey for many other parts of the community and for our users,” Shuttleworth said to an audience of Linux developers. “When you make a release it has all sorts of other benefits. It broadens the base of people who can participate.”

Releases also generate a tremendous amount of testing, which improves the software, Shuttleworth continued. But shorter cycles don’t only mean more testing; they also force developers to plan and set priorities.

“If you give yourself a shorter amount of time, you say to yourself, ‘What are the most important things for us to get done?’” Shuttleworth said.
Finally, each release brings publicity.

“We’re doing amazing stuff. A release is an opportunity to get out there and talk about that… generate publicity that brings more contributors, participants and users,” Shuttleworth said.

The man obviously knows what he’s talking about: I can hardly wait to give Lucid a spin – and write about it here.

Browser of choice

2009-12-08T02:08:00Z

A colleague recently tweeted that he was dumping Mozilla Firefox for Google Chrome. Half in jest, I said, “You’ll be back.”

My prediction wasn’t based on any fierce brand loyalty. I too have gone through periods when I stopped using Firefox in favor of Opera, usually because of some annoying bug. After Google finally released a decent Linux version of its much-hyped browser, I dabbled with Chrome, too. Eventually, however, I would always return to Firefox as my browser of choice because a new version would fix the bug and throw in new features that were compelling.

Chrome’s main attraction, of course, is its speed. Fire up Chrome and Web pages seem to pop up almost instantly. Also, as you might expect, Chrome is optimized to run Ajax-based sites such as Gmail and Google Docs really fast.

But Firefox is no slouch, either. The current version, 3.5, is twice as fast as 3.0, 10 times faster than 2.0, and scores decently in most speed tests against other browsers. The next version, 3.6 (codenamed Namoroka, after a national park in Madagascar), is already on its fourth beta, and promises some performance tweaks and features that make it even more interesting.

Over the weekend, I downloaded Namoroka and ran it side by side with Firefox 3.5 on an Ubuntu desktop PC to see what the future release will look like.

The most obvious change in 3.6 is the built-in support for personas, which are lightweight, easy-to-install and easy-to-change “skins” for the browser. Available as an add-on in 3.5, personas enable you to change the way your browser looks with a single click. To browse the more than 37,000 skins now available, simply visit the personas Web site (http://www.getpersonas.com) and pick the look you like. With Firefox 3.6, mousing over a persona previews the skin on your browser; click on the “wear this” button to put the persona on. You can change the Persona just as quickly by picking another one from the gallery, or, you can retrieve your previous choices by going to the “themes” tab of the Add-ons menu. Be forewarned: there are so many choices in the personas gallery that you’re likely to spend more time here than you thought.

Other changes in 3.6 are under the hood.

The Gecko rendering engine has been improved to run faster and be more responsive. JavaScript, too, executes a tad faster on 3.6, although most tests show it is still much slower than Chrome in this regard.

Firefox 3.6 will also alert users about plug-ins that are out of date. This is important because outdated versions of plug-ins can cause crashes and other stability problems, and, as in the case of Adobe Flash, can also be a significant security risk. Starting with 3.6, when you load a Web page that uses an outdated plug-in, you’ll get a warning and a button next to it that helps you update the plug-in.

Speaking to Linux Insider, Redmonk analyst Stephen O’Grady says Mozilla has done a good job responding to Chrome’s speed advantage.

Mozilla has also been continuing to build out user enhancements, O’Grady added, “ranging from the aesthetic —such as personas… to the more subtle, but potentially more significant.”

On the balance, O’Grady describes 3.6 as “a very nice, incremental upgrade”—but more interesting developments are afoot.

One of these is the integration of the Ubiquity add-on, which enables users to issue natural syntax commands to the browser by typing them into the location bar.

Another development to watch is support for Direct2D acceleration, set for Firefox 3.7. which allows the software to make calls directly to the graphics card. This means the browser will be able to use the graphics card instead of the PC processor to render Web pages, which can dramatically speed up browsing.

Although I have tried many browsers, one factor has always led me back to Firefox: the ease with which I can customize it to do what I want.

I have an almost visceral dislike for the minimalist look of Chrome, which hides the traditional menu bar commands behind a few icons. On the other hand, if I really wanted this look, I could get it on Firefox with two add-ons (Chromifox Basic and Chromin Frame).

Given my personal preferences, I dread the day Firefox adopts the menu-less Chrome or Windows 7 look. If that day comes, however, I’m reasonably confident that some like-minded programmer will create an add-on to give me back my menus.

Firefox after five years

2009-12-01T02:05:00Z

FIVE years ago last month, Firefox rose from the ashes of Netscape’s crushing defeat at the hands of Microsoft in the first browser wars. In that first encounter, Microsoft used its monopoly in operating systems to clobber Netscape by bundling its own browser, Internet Explorer, with every copy of Windows. This strategy made IE the default browser for most Windows users and wiped out the early lead that Netscape enjoyed. As a result, Netscape’s share of the browser market plummeted from more than 80 percent in 1996 to less than 5 percent by 2003.

An unlikely combination of developments, however, broke Microsoft’s monopoly over browsers.

First, Netscape open-sourced its browser code, enabling a wider community of programmers to contribute to what became known as the Mozilla project.

Then, in 2002, programmers Dave Hyatt and Blake Ross created an experimental project within Mozilla that did exactly the opposite of what Netscape was doing at the time, which was to cram more and more applications into its browser.

Their reaction against software bloat eventually led to a stripped-down browser called Phoenix, which was later renamed Firebird because of trademark issues with Phoenix Technologies, the company that makes the basic input/output system for PCs. The browser was again renamed, this time to Firefox, because a database server already used the Firebird brand.

On Nov. 9, 2004, Mozilla Firefox 1.0 was released.

With strong support from the open source community, Firefox would steadily improve over the next five years and reclaim market share from Internet Explorer, even though Microsoft continued to bundle its browser with Windows.

Today, with 330 million downloads, Firefox accounts for about 25 percent of the browsers in use. IE has dropped from 90 percent to about 67 percent. This success is significant because it demonstrates how the open source model can deliver high-quality software in a self-sustaining way.

On Firefox’s fifth birthday, Mozilla’s open source evangelist Christopher Blizzard blogged about major themes in the last five years and the future of Web browsers.

One clear trend in the last five years, he said, was the emergence of modern browsers which incorporate technologies such as fast JavaScript that enable them to run Web-based applications.

“One thing that’s become obvious over the last five years is the wide gap that’s emerging between the field of modern browsers —Firefox, Safari, Opera and Chrome—with the world’s most popular browser—IE,” Blizzard said.

Another important trend is the growing importance of standards in browser development. This adherence to standards enabled Apple to use KHTML, an open source layout engine, to create Safari, and helped Google to create Chrome.

“Standards matter, and they should continue to matter,” Blizzard wrote. “When they do those individual human beings we like to call users benefit with greater choice and fast innovation.”

Led by Firefox’s add-on system, the last five years also saw “an explosion in the number of people who are customizing their experiences —both in browsers and on the Web,” Blizzard said.

“The Web is unique, and was built to be hacked. No other widely deployed system in the world delivers itself as source code like the Web does. And this transparency has made it possible for the distributed innovation that we’re seeing in Firefox and on the Web,” he added.

Looking forward, Blizzard said we can expect improvements in the way video is handled on the Web. As more and more transactions are carried out online, data security, privacy and the safeguards against identity theft will become crucial.

Mobile phones, too, will play an increasing role in the development of browsers and the Web.

“The decisions of users, carriers, governments and the people who build phones will have far-reaching effects on this new extension to the Internet and how people will access information for decades to come,” Blizzard concluded.

So much has happened in the browser market in the last year or two that it is difficult to predict what the next five years will look like. One thing is certain, however. By what it has achieved so far, Firefox has already shaped that future.