Chad's News

The Chromebook is a “nothing but the web” laptop that runs Google’s Chrome browser on top of Google Chrome OS. It has the capability to upload and download files to a thumb drive but has almost no local storage. Any programs you run on it must be web applications that can be executed within a browser. With the increasing popularity of the cloud, however, it’s not too difficult to work within these constraints. Note that Chromebooks are manufactured by several different companies, and that Google itself is not one of them.

Link: http://www.techrepublic.com/…

Google and Facebook are offering two-factor authentication to help prevent your account from being hijacked. In both cases, you give them your phone number, then when you log in using your normal username and password, they send a code to your phone. You must enter the code as part of the login process. Gmail does this for every login, while for Facebook it’s only when you log in from a device that hasn’t already been verified.

Thanks to Josh for this topic.

Link #1 (Gmail): http://googleblog.blogspot.com/…

Link #2 (Facebook): http://www.facebook.com/…
(via Slashdot)

One of the advertised benefits of cloud computing is high availability and redundancy. Back in April, however, some of Amazon’s cloud storage services suffered an outage that lasted for about three days, bringing down websites of several high-profile customers.

The initial problem was quickly fixed, but oddly enough, the extended outage was caused by the cloud management software attempting to prevent the loss of data. Amazon essentially performed a denial-of-service attack on its own storage servers which took three days to fix.

This event brings up an inherent problem with cloud computing: complexity. As a programmer, I know that error-handling code tends to go untested (or has minimal testing), just because it can be difficult to create the errors necessary to exercise the code, or because it takes too much time and money in a competitive business environment. It’s obvious that Amazon did not test for the type of situation that occurred on April 21^st. The linked article makes the argument that cloud computing systems have much more complexity than would the individual systems in a non-cloud environment. So cloud providers, to prevent these types of outages from happening in the future, will have to learn how to better deal with complexity.

Thanks to Josh for this topic.

Link: http://arstechnica.com/…

Web developer Mike Cardwell has created a web page that determines if you’re logged in to various sites. It does this by trying to load something (an image, script, etc.) from those sites—something that you must be logged in to access. A script is executed depending upon whether the load succeeds or fails. Quite tricky, and another reminder that online privacy doesn’t exist.

Link: https://grepular.com/…
(via Slashdot)

I went to amazon.com the other day and noticed a front-page announcement about two new services. The first is the Amazon Cloud Drive, an online storage system with 5GB of free storage and the ability to pay for additional space. There are lots of online storage sites, however, and what makes this one different is how Amazon has integrated it with their MP3 store. In addition to the Cloud Drive, there’s also the Amazon Cloud Player, an online music player that works on any Mac, PC, or Android device. It’s tightly integrated with the Cloud Drive—music files stored in your Cloud Drive are available to the Cloud Player. Music purchases from the Amazon MP3 Store can be automatically uploaded to the Cloud Drive, and they don’t count against the 5GB limit.

I like the Cloud Drive because, unlike other free file storage sites, this one probably won’t go out of business. And Amazon has hit on a good concept, allowing you to store your music in a central location that’s accessible from anywhere on the internet. I make a habit of purchasing music from the Amazon MP3 Store whenever possible, so this is pretty useful. No longer is there the possibility of losing my entire music collection because a hard drive fails.

There are, however, a couple downsides. First, the only mobile devices that are truly supported are Android devices. The Cloud player is not “optimized” for iPhones, iPads, Blackberries, and Windows 7 phones. I guess that means you could play the music via a supported browser on those devices, but that it wouldn’t work very well. Second, only MP3 and non-copy protected AAC (iTunes Store) formats are supported by the music player. For those with an older, extensive library from the iTunes Store, this may not be the best way to go (or at least consider upgrading your library to iTunes Plus).

I’m using the Cloud Player right now, and it’s working quite well. No skips or stutters. One final note, I manually uploaded my music library which was a lengthy process. Turns out there’s an MP3 uploader program that makes the initial upload much easier.

I’ve read horror stories of elderly people who’ve paid thousands of dollars to rent their phones from the phone company (dating from the breakup of AT&T back in the 1980s). Well, it appears that AOL is making money from a similar situation. According to an article in The New Yorker (subscription required) by Ken Auletta, 75 percent of AOL subscribers are paying a $25/month dial-up fee despite the fact that they have DSL or cable internet. If correct, these overpayments add up to $1 billion each year. And as with the phone rentals mentioned above, these customers tend to be elderly.

Link: http://www.pcmag.com/…
(topic via Slashdot)

Here at the Chad’s News network command center, we use OpenDNS and have previously written about using Google’s DNS resolver instead of the one provided by your ISP. Google and OpenDNS are recommended because of their reliability, speed, and features, but it may not always be advantageous to use them. Akamai is a content delivery company with web servers around the world. They deliver content for their customers using algorithms to determine which Akamai server is physically closest to the location of the person downloading the material. This significantly speeds up the delivery and also balances the load across multiple sources. But it appears that one of the ways Akamai determines your physical location is via the DNS resolver that you’re using. And as the linked article explains, this creates bottlenecks for OpenDNS and Google DNS. By switching back to his ISP’s DNS resolver, the author was able to shorten a 2+ hour iTunes video download into less than 20 seconds.

Link: http://joemaller.com/…
(via Slashdot)

Regular Chad’s News readers already know that the Internet Assigned Numbers Authority has been close to running out of IP address blocks. Well, it’s finally happened. As of February 3rd, the last free Class A blocks were allocated to the Regional Internet Registries. It will take at least a few months for the RIRs to run dry, but it will happen.

This doesn’t mean that the internet will suddenly come crashing down or that people will not be able to connect. There are workarounds for the lack of IP addresses, and the long-term solution, switching to IPv6, has been around for years. Network engineers have long known this day was coming, but have been putting it off because it takes time and money to upgrade. Now that we’re close to running out of IP addresses, however, the need is more pressing and we may see more action.

Link: http://arstechnica.com/…

Microsoft appears to be abandoning its Silverlight technology in favor of HTML5. Silverlight was Redmond’s attempt to compete with Adobe Flash. All is not lost, however, as it still appears that Silverlight will remain a platform of choice for developing apps on Windows Phone 7 devices.

Link: http://arstechnica.com/…

The World Wide Web was originally designed to be state-less. That is, information is not remembered between visits to various web pages, or even to the same web page. Today, of course, that is not the case, and the main mechanism for communicating between visits is the cookie, also known as a browser cookie or an HTTP cookie. Cookies contain a small amount of text data that your browser stores and sends back to the web server whenever you request a web page from that server. This permits many things, such as keeping you logged in, remembering your settings, or tracking which items you’ve looked at in an online store.

As a web developer, I know that the rules governing HTTP cookies are pretty loose. There have been some efforts to make a concrete standard, but nothing has been formally approved, and the existing IETF RFCs are taken as suggestions by browser manufacturers rather than rules. I didn’t know just how bad it was, however, until I read the linked article. Cookies were defined in a haphazard manner and have stayed that way ever since. Each browser implements cookies in a slightly different manner, and don’t even ask me about the limits on the size of individual cookies, the number of cookies per domain, the total number of cookies, and the total size of all cookies combined. The linked article says, “there is simply no accurate, official account of cookie behavior in modern browsers.” As a web developer, unfortunately, you have to go with the lowest common denominator when working with cookies. Definitely not the way to specify such an important part of the internet.

Link: http://lcamtuf.blogspot.com/…
(via Slashdot)

Many past efforts to promote cloud computing have failed miserably, but it’s become more popular over the last few years, even here at Chad’s News. The linked articles detail two more steps in the long road towards universal acceptance. The first is Neverware, a way to run a powerful Windows system from a low-end computer. The second is Google’s cloud print, which allows a user to print a document from portable devices such as smartphones.

Thanks to Josh for the cloud print link.

Link #1 (Neverware): http://www.observer.com/…
(via Kim Komando)

Link #2 (cloud print): http://googlemobile.blogspot.com/…
(via MacRumors.com)

As the world comes closer to running out of IP addresses, we’re going to hear more about IPv6 which has more than 340,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000 possible addresses (versus the piddly 4.3 billion currently allowed by IPv4). TechRepublic explains 10 things you might not know about IPv6 addressing, including just what ::1 means.

Link: http://blogs.techrepublic.com.com/…