The Ashimmy Blog

The Sleazy Dark Side of Product Reviews

Yesterday I wrote in response to Bill Brenner’s Salted Hash post about the Google-funded, Accuvant conducted browser security study which found (surprise) Chrome on top.

In my post yesterday I mentioned that one company that I thought is doing product  reviews right was NSS Labs.  Well Rick Moy of NSS Labs wrote me last night, having read my post.  The NSS Labs folks have had a look at what was publicly available.

Vik Phatak, CTO of NSS Labs has a blog post up on the subject here. More importantly Vik and team have put out a more complete analysis of problems they see with the way this study was conducted and some issues in Google’s behavior. You can read the analysis here.

It is a very interesting read and you should take a look for sure.  It certainly raises some questions about what went on with this browser study and calls into question some very questionable practices by Google. 

It just proves that product reviews are a dirty business and why any reader has to look at and weigh all factors in deciding how much faith to put in them.

Related articles

• The Death of Product Reviews (ashimmy.com)
• What's the Most Secure Web Browser? [Security] (lifehacker.com)
• Chrome sandboxing makes it the most secure browser, vendor study claims (arstechnica.com)
• NSS Labs claims its new tool can detect all Duqu drivers (infoworld.com)
• NSS Labs Claims Its New Tool Can Detect All Duqu Drivers (pcworld.com)

Facetime vs Skype on iPhone

Image via CrunchBase

OK, so it is the day before a long New Years weekend and I am feeling a little bit geeky.  I just upgraded to the new Skype 3.0 on my iPhone. You know the one with video calling over 3G and WiFi.  It works pretty well and I had several calls.  The pictures were OK, but though I don’t use Facetime much, they didn’t seem as crisp.

So I did an experiment with my friend Steve Scop.  First Steve and I did a Skype video call on our phones over WiFi and then we did a Facetime call.

Here is the picture from Skype:

Here is the picture from Facetime:

I didn’t edit these other than resizing. As you can see the Facetime picture is much sharper.  On the other hand, you can’t use Facetime unless you are on WiFi and the other person you are calling is on an iPhone 4 too. Skype can call anyone on computer or phone, on 3G or WiFi.  I am not sure but have heard that Skype can drain your phone battery pretty well too.

Anyway, you be the judge.  Obviously a better picture with Facetime, but more useable with Skype.

Happy New Year!

Cool new technology

My friend Brad Feld is always looking for the next big thing.  That is what VCs do I guess.  Being a techno/gadget boy I like to see what Brad is up to next. It keeps me up on what is happening.  Brad’s Foundry Group today announced a new investment in a new company called Sifteo. 

Sifteo comes out of the MIT media labs and is in the theme of Foundry’s Human Computer Interaction theme. I could try to explain what Sifteo does, but this video does a much better job than I ever could:

Good luck to Sifteo, Brad, Ryan, Seth and Jason. Looks like a really cool new technology!

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To Live and Die in a Socially Networked World

I got some bad news last night. A former co-worker and friend of mine, Ernie Ferraro passed away yesterday. Ernie and I worked together at Interliant. He was assistant general counsel, I was VP of business development. We did lots of deals together. 

Besides working together, Ernie and I had a good time and were friends. He was a true gentlemen. His first child, Olivia was born the same day as my oldest son Landon. They are both 10 years old now. We got them together a few times before I moved the family to Florida.

I stayed in touch with Ernie over the years. Mostly on Linked In or Facebook, not really seeing each other in person as much. He was always threatening to stop by when the family was in Florida, I saying next trip to NY, lets get together.

How many of you have been carrying on relationships like that with friends and colleagues? You may not call them on the phone or even email them, but seeing an update from them on a regular basis makes you feel like the connection is still strong. An occasional chat on line and you are caught up.

I just chatted with Ernie last week on Facebook. He said that he had no power in his house for days due to the weather. I told him to get away and come down here. He said that his parents were in Florida and so he and the family were staying at their house in NY. I said OK, but lets get together soon.

It seems Ernie came down with bacterial meningitis just a few days after we chatted and slipped into a coma this weekend. Yesterday the decision was made to remove him from life support.

I found out about Ernie’s plight while chatting with another former colleague of ours on Facebook. I was devastated by the news. I went over to Ernie’s Facebook page, numb and in shock.

There was such an outpouring of love on his page. Literally hundreds of people had left heartfelt messages. Each in their own way conveying their sympathy, support and love. I felt part of a community.

I left my own message to Ernie and his family. I read with tear filled eyes the message from Olivia to her daddy about not being sad about missing so many of her life accomplishments to come. Of course I couldn’t help but think of my own children and how much I want to see them accomplish and do. It both broke my heart and gave me strength to go on.

But moving beyond that, what a profound difference social networking has made in our day to day lives. Not just in living our lives, but in death as well. It is changing the way we grieve, how we express our grief and how we share our sorrow.

I thought back to just over a month ago. My good friend Mitchell Ashley was sitting bedside at a hospice in Colorado, as his wife Mary Ellen fought her final battle in a years long war with breast cancer.

I didn’t want to pester Mitchell for updates minute by minute. But Mitchell was brave enough to post a constant stream of updates on Facebook of what was going on, how Mary Ellen was doing, what he was feeling.

Though I was 1700 miles away, I felt like I was there with Mitchell. Not just myself either. From the posts and messages I know that many near and far to Mitchell were following his updates and sending good thoughts and prayers his way. I again felt like I was part of a community who was both supporting Mitchell and sharing in the trauma. There was a giving of support and a partaking in the moment.

In speaking to Mitchell I know that it was a cathartic experience for him to share the experience in that way. After Mary Ellen passed away, Mitchell posted several poems and other thoughts about how he was feeling and dealing with the grieving process. It was a great outlet for him. Many of his friends and family post and comment on the page as well.

It is a great outlet and way to share for all of us. In death, maybe more than in life, I guess humans need to share. Social networking presents us with a new way of sharing. It makes you feel connected no matter the physical distance. It gives us strength. It also gives us unprecedented insight into what others are feeling and saying as well. It truly connects us.

I think that grief counselors, psychologists and mental health professionals should start using social networking as a way of helping those in need. It can be a great force for good at the worst of times.

So for those who say Twitter and Facebook are for people who feel compelled to tell everyone every move they make and they don’t care what plant you harvested or what plane you just got on, you are missing the point. Social networking is about socializing. It has changed our lives already in so many ways. From the cradle to the grave and beyond, nothing is the same. And that is not necessarily a bad thing.

To my friends Ernie and Mary Ellen, rest in peace with God. We left here on this earth will miss your smiles and warmth and sharing.

The frustrations of mass market, web based services, Hotmail is the poster child

I know we dribble all over ourselves about the cloud and web based services. Isn’t it grand to be able to access stuff anywhere anytime. But there is a deep, dark side to the web based world we are living in. That is when something goes wrong.

We have all probably dealt with this one way or another. These web based services are built to scale to millions, tens of millions and more users. When they work they are great, when they don’t though, God help you.  Try getting support from Microsoft Hotmail, Yahoo, Google, Facebook or any of their brethren.

I first ran into this when my blog was hacked a few years back. I was locked out of my typepad, go daddy, hotmail and yahoo accounts and couldn’t get anyone there to do a damn thing about it following their usual support procedures.

Finally I had to resort to calling people I knew at each of these companies to get my problem resolved. But the average person would be up the creek.

That was a few years ago, but it is no better today. Today I experienced a similar story with Hotmail. I use hotmail for my personal mail and my The CISO Group mail for business. I get a ton of email on Hotmail though.  I noticed that I had not received anything though since early this morning. That is very unusual due to all of the Google alerts and other notices I receive in hotmail.

Both my iPhone and Outlook showed I was connected to Hotmail, there was just no new mail. I logged into Windows Live and it showed the same thing. I sent an email from my CISO Group mailbox to my hotmail box and it never made it there. I then sent a hotmail mail to my CISO Group and it came through in a matter of seconds.

So the problem seems to be that I can send and receive mail sent from within my hotmail account, but can’t receive anything from outside of it.  That is a problem. I get withdrawals without my email.

I logged into Hotmail help and followed the link to support. That is when I knew that something was very wrong. It took like 2 or 3 trys to pull up live support. When I did it took a few minutes for the page to load. Other web sites are running fine. Obviously there is a something rotten in Denmark with Hotmail today.

Do you think someone there has the sense to post something and let people know? Of course not. Is there anyway of contacting anyone? Of course not. Is this acceptable service? OF COURSE NOT!

So know I have to go through my contacts and go call someone from Microsoft who might know someone from Hotmail. I may get lucky or I may just have to wait until they figure out what is wrong and do something about it.

In the meantime mass market, cloud based service will never win until uptime issues like this and a better level of support are in place!

In the cloud what's old is new again

I saw an article on C/Net tonight that caused me to have a deja vu moment. Dave Rosenberg wrote about IBM grabbing the largest cloud deployment to date. IBM will host for Panasonic at first up to 100k Lotus Notes live users “in the cloud” and moving up to 300k. Hosting Lotus Notes in the cloud. Wow, cutting edge! My CISO Group partner Parker Yates, will get a kick out of this one too.

It was just about 10 years ago that Parker and I were at Interliant. We had just gone public a few months before and neither of us knew that we were staring into the precipice of the dot com bubble bursting. Interliant was a pioneer in what was called ASP – application service provider for you kids out there. Our bread and butter hosted app?  Lotus Notes on Lotus Domino servers. Domino R5 was the hot stuff then. We were a major partner with IBM and probably the largest hosted Notes provider in the world.

Reading Dave’s article about what IBM was offering in this record shattering cloud deployment, I went to the wayback machine and had a look where Interliant was then. Here is what we were offering right before 9/11:

Customers access Notes mail and applications on Domino servers that reside at an Interliant data center. Users' Notes clients (or Web browser) access servers at Interliant over the Internet or via a direct connection such as Frame Relay. In addition to mail and application servers, customers' Internet Gateway (SMTP) and "hub" servers all reside at Interliant, thus fully leveraging Interliant's world class facilities.

Sounds pretty cloud like to me. What about you? Frame relay? Pretty cool, huh? I know, I know, you are saying, what about the security? How can you have a cloud without security?

Well here is an excerpt from the managed security solution listed on the same web site:

Our INIT SECURITY solutions are based on best-in-class firewall and Virtual Private Network (VPN) technologies, coupled with qualified security architecture design as well as monitoring and management services. INIT SECURITY solutions leverage state-of-the-art security products from industry leaders, such as Check Point^TM, Nokia^®, and other major vendors. We analyze your security requirements, and tailor a secure hosted solution, available 24x7.

We take away the overhead — you don’t need to buy the software and hardware, or manage the devices. This service-based, hosted approach accelerates your speed to functionality, and allows you to sidestep e-vulnerability concerns.

INIT Managed Firewall Service

This service provides full security consultation, configuration, and on-going maintenance and management of a client’s specific security requirements as they relate to a hosted environment. The service includes set up and installation, monitoring and management, logging and reporting, policy management, firewall updates, as well as quarterly performance audits and policy review.

INIT Remote Managed Firewall Service

This service enables customers to outsource the design, implementation, monitoring, management and maintenance of their on-site firewall hardware and software to professionally certified Interliant security engineers. INIT Remote MFS adds industrial-strength professional services to protect against malicious intruders and potential hackers. The offering includes an initial security assessment, design, implementation, 24x7 monitoring and management, logging and reporting, policy management, firewall updates, as well as quarterly performance audits and tuning.

Key advantages include:

Peace of Mind: INIT SECURITY solutions shield your organization from the anxiety of network and Internet vulnerability — our experts work 24x7 to ensure that your applications and data are always protected                 

Tailored, Best-in-Class: INIT SECURITY experts evaluate your environment to understand where and how you are vulnerable. This means analyzing your business practices and IT infrastructure. We leverage best-in-class technologies from security leaders to protect your environment, and design security solutions to provide tailored support and peace of mind                  

Relevance: INIT SECURITY experts rapidly update and reconfigure your security solution to address emerging threats and changes in your business operations                   
Simplicity: INIT SECURITY solutions allow your organization to sidestep IT complexity — such as deployment and management of your security solution                   
Reduced Cost of Ownership: INIT SECURITY solutions offer hosted access to best-in-class security solutions. You don’t have to extend funds to buy, install, and update the technologies                   
Investment Protection: INIT SECURITY solutions allow you to choose the best solutions today, without worrying about their ability to address tomorrow’s threats. We migrate your solution to harness state-of-the-art security technology. You’re never saddled with obsolete infrastructure

Interliant recognizes the business challenges in today’s competitive global environment — we’ll take total responsibility for your IT requirements, liberating you to focus on your core business.

Guys this was 10 years ago. It could just as easily be on today’s web sites.  Pretty weird right? Are you having a deja vu? So how the hell did we go bankrupt? Maybe we were just up in the cloud before it was cool?

Nova Development Print Artist an example of terrible software design

As I wrote over the weekend I recently upgraded my wife’s dinosaur machine to Windows 7. Everything worked great and I was very impressed with how right Microsoft got it on Windows 7.

Out of everything on her machine, hardware and software - the only thing that came up incompatible was her Print Shop Pro version 20.  Windows actually came up with a warning that said there were known driver problems with this product and even using the compatibility feature built in to Windows 7.

The kids and I use the Print Shop for a lot of their school projects, so that was a problem. We went down to Best Buy looking for an upgrade. They did not have Print Shop in stock, but had a competing product, Print Artist.

I knew Print Artist from earlier in my experience and it was by Sierra, so felt confident buying it.  It advertised on the box how it had more graphics, projects, fonts then Print Shop.

Got home, installed the software and boy what a piece of junk! What they have done is just put a ton of graphics, most of them terrible cartoons onto DVDs. There is no search feature for the DVDs. You have to go through the DVD pictures one at a time looking for what you want. Over 300,000 clip arts and no search feature!

For the clip art that came with the product and not on disk, the search feature was so limited and crippled as to make unusable. That was just the tip of the iceberg. The whole program was a joke.

It seems Sierra sold the product to Nova sometime back and they have just tried to milk the cow here without doing anything substantive. In fact the product has gotten worse.

I called the support number today and the poor guy who answered the phone could only blame the developers for being non-responsive. Lots of people complain about this. He gave me the number to call to get info to send the software in for a refund.

So I sent it back to get my 40 dollars back. Will let you know if at least Nova gets that right. In the meantime, stay away from Print Artist!

Windows 7 rocks!

When Windows Vista came out a few years back, I played with it a bit. I quickly decided I couldn’t deal with the nagging. I ditched it and stuck with XP all this time. If it ain’t broke, don’t fix it.

As part of getting ready to launch the new company (will blog that next, but big stuff next week), I have joined the Microsoft BizSpark program.  For those of you who don’t know about BizSpark, it is a great program for start up companies.  Once accepted you have access to lots of great Microsoft (that’s right great Microsoft) software.

So this past week I was up late almost every night working away. I downloaded a copy of Windows 7, backed up my laptop’s hard drive onto a USB drive and had at it.

I didn’t think I would have many problems upgrading my IBM Lenovo ThinkPad. Though it was an XP machine, it has lots of RAM and is not that old.  Things went smooth as silk! I had Windows 7 up and running in no time with no mess and no fuss.

I was really impressed by how snappy it was on the latptop too.  I upgraded the latest version of Office and was equally happy to see that some of the bloat had gone down.  Windows 7 seems to be one that Microsoft got right. It just recognized everything and just worked.

After a few days of satisfied computing, I decided to put it to the test. My wife Bonnie’s machine is an ancient desktop. It is like a 1.8 Ghz, single processor Pentium with 3 or 4 Gigs of RAM. Two hard drives, a CD drive and a DVD drive.

I put the DVD in and crossed my fingers. The partitions were in the wrong format and so the entire disks had to be reformatted. So no windows.old files for me to use to put stuff back.

But no problem, Win 7 went right on and booted right up.  On first boot up, my sound card was not recognized, my USB wireless adapter did not work and the video card and display had generic VGA drivers.  I went into device manager. Clicked each faulty device with the yellow exclamation and installed drivers. Once I got the USB wireless adapter up by using the old XP driver, Windows 7 found updated drivers automatically over the net.

In about 20 minutes everything worked. Once I get the nVidia GeForce 2 video card working with the XP  driver I had great aero capability at high resolution and color depth.  The computer actually runs better now then it did with XP. Probably because 5 years of crap had been wiped off the machine.

Anyway, one day in and Bonnie’s machine is rocking. The kids used it for some online homework. Bonnie did her mail and I played the chess game for good measure. Windows 7 continues to impress me.

We are always quick to bash Microsoft, but it looks like the did something right with Windows 7.

 

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Have smartphone will travel

Image by Getty Images via Daylife

Yesterday the news was all about yet another blackberry outage. When it isn’t blackberry, it is AT&T. Sprint, Verizon, Metro – lets face it, they all suck. It really becomes a question of '”who sucks less” as my friend Brad likes to talk about.

The reality is that they all don’t suck at the same time. Fred Wilson had an interesting post up about his experiences with the Blackberry outage yesterday. He had an idea to just take his SIM card out of the blackberry and put it in another phone and it would work. But alas it did not. Not sure why, but Fred thinks it had something to do with Blackberry being tied to the network. The blackberry outage effected the carrier network.  Maybe, maybe not.

Of course the iPhone is worse. I love the functionality of my iPhone. I just hate the fact that crappy network, crappy customer service AT&T is tethered to it. Funny AT&T is tethered to my iPhone, but AT&T can’t give me tethering through my iPhone. But that is just another brick in the wall of this story.

Why can’t we just by a phone from a phone store and plug it into any network we want. You buy a phone for your house and plug it in the jack in the wall, does your phone company care what brand or make it is? No. Should be the same thing with phones.

Let me sign up for cell service at an agreed rate. Give me a SIM card and let me plug it into any phone I want. Yeah, I know most of the carriers say you can do just that. But you can’t. It is hard to find unlocked phones and prohibitively expensive. I understand that carriers subsidize the cost of phones, but there are other business models to use.

The Google folks may be trying to do just this with the Google phone. Of course they are playing it close to the vest, but this article lays out some of the possibilities. Maybe an ad supported model makes unlocked phones a reality for the market.

In any event I dream of the day where I buy a phone from a phone store at a reasonable price and I can plug it into any cell phone carrier that I want to pay for using their reliable, available and fast network! That is my wish for Christmas!

Merry Christmas and Happy New Year to all of my readers!

Computer Science is in Middle School, you just need to know where to look

Two of my favorite bloggers, Brad Feld and Fred Wilson have recently written bemoaning the sorry state of affairs regarding computer science education at the K-12 levels in our country. Fred specifically wants to see programming in middle schools.  Both Fred and Brad are probably a little geekier then the population at large, but I agree with them. To be competitive in the world economy that today’s middle school students will compete in, they need a deeper, better foundation in computer science.

As the father of a son who will be attending middle school next year, I am probably a little more tuned in to what the schools are offering than either Fred or Brad.  Of course my expertise is focused more to my own area here in South Florida. 

I am proud to report that at least here in the Boca Raton area we are giving middle school kids a great foundation in computer science. Boca Raton you say? Must be some expensive private schools, right? Wrong. I am talking public schools here. Generally speaking Florida is not known for a great public school system (our public universities on the other hand are first rate). With so much of our budget dollars geared towards the senior population, historically the kids school budget suffered down here. But not anymore.

A few years back the Palm Beach public school system opened up what they call “choice programs” for middle schools. There are programs in hi tech, pre-engineering, pre-med, pre-law, math, science and technology, IB programs and a bunch of others. Students may apply to any school in the district for a specific choice program.

Here in Boca Raton we have three middle schools with excellent choice programs that my son is considering. One is the Don Estridge High Tech Middle School. The “Don” as it is called is a very popular choice with both boys and girls here. The high tech program includes not only proficiency in computer productivity applications, but also introductions to programming, hardware, networking, web design and video game programming. This is in addition to the regular curriculum that the students must take as well.  Kids come out of the Don and can continue their computer science education at any number of local high schools in the area. Here are links to the course descriptions for 6th and 7th grade at the Don.

Besides Don Estridge ,of the other middles schools in Boca that my son is considering one offers a great pre-engineering class with great hands on civil engineering and CAD instruction. Another offers a great medical science program with an emphasis on forensics. Sort of like CSI Boca. The kids are given clues and need to solve crimes. A trip to the morgue is a “highlight” of the program.

So if it is being done here in Boca Raton, I am sure it is on the agenda in other areas as well. I do think our schools are responding to the realities of the world that their students will live in. Of course budget cuts and such make it difficult. God knows our teachers are not paid enough for the important job they are tasked with. We could do a lot better across the board. But there are great choices out there for kids if you know where to look!