How I Know That Google is not Truly Evil Yet

I received an e-mail about Adsense today:

We have launched a new capability in AdSense allowing Google-certified ad networks compete directly within AdSense, which means that advertisers from these third-party networks will be able to compete with AdWords advertisers to show on the Google Content Network.

These new capabilities will automatically be enabled for your account, and you'll see a new section in your Ad Review Center where you can allow or block specific ad networks or all networks except AdWords. Please note that we'll gradually be adding new ad networks to AdSense accounts over the next few months, so you won't see any immediate impact on your ads or your earnings.

To ensure the quality of the ads that appear on AdSense publisher websites, Google will certify all participating ad networks for adherence to our standards for user privacy, ad quality, and speed. Some participating ad networks use targeting methods similar to Google's interest-based advertising to show more relevant ads to users on the sites they visit. These ad networks won't be permitted to collect data from your site for the purpose of subsequent interest-based advertising, but we'll allow networks that comply with user privacy guidelines to show ads using these tools. Publishers can opt out of user interest targeting from these ad networks, and Google has changed our requirements for third-party ad serving to reflect this.

We are currently only accepting ads from Google-certified ad networks in North America and Europe, but we will make this feature available to ad networks in additional parts of the world in the future.

In my opinion, Google doesn't have a monopoly on search. Sure, it has an enormous market share, which is growing, but there are other major players, and there's no lock-in for search. On the other hand, Google may very well have a monopoly on advertising in Adwords, and advertisers regularly claim that prices for keywords are much more expensive on Adwords than on other networks owing to the auction process.

Yet, despite making virtually all of its money off of this product, Google plans to open it up to competition. As far as I know, no government forced GOOG's hand. There was no mandate from the EU.

Google's leaders say that they believe the company can out-compete others in the industry, and their actions follow these statements. I believe that Google may actually believe them.

They're not evil (yet). Here's the Google blog.

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Must Read: A New Approach to China

You need to read A New Approach to China on the Official Google blog. No, it's not about Ubuntu. It may, however, be more important.

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Official Google Blog: The meaning of open

This is an extremely interesting view into Google's opinion of open standards, open source, and open information. Official Google Blog: The meaning of open

Open Standards

Today, we base our developer products on open standards because interoperability is a critical element of user choice. What does this mean for Google Product Managers and Engineers? Simple: whenever possible, use existing open standards. If you are venturing into an area where open standards don't exist, create them. If existing standards aren't as good as they should be, work to improve them and make those improvements as simple and well documented as you can. Our top priorities should always be users and the industry at large and not just the good of Google, and you should work with standards committees to make our changes part of the accepted specification.

Open Source

So as you are building your product or adding new features, stop and ask yourself: Would open sourcing this code promote the open Internet? Would it spur greater user, advertiser, and partner choice? Would it lead to greater competition and innovation? If so, then you should make it open source. And when you do, do it right; don't just push it over the wall into the public realm and forget about it. Make sure you have the resources to pay attention to the code and foster developer engagement.

Open Information

So while having more personal information online can be quite beneficial to everyone, its uses should be guided by principles that are responsible, scalable, and flexible enough to grow and change with our industry. And unlike open technology, where our objective is to grow the Internet ecosystem, our approach to open information is to build trust with the individuals who engage within that ecosystem (users, partners, and customers). Trust is the most important currency online, so to build it we adhere to three principles of open information: value, transparency, and control.

Obligatory ChromeOS Post

 

Since ChromeOS requires Ubuntu to build the new operating system (and is based on it), I can't ignore it, can I? I may get fancy-schmancy and build it if an image doesn't come on-line in an hour or two.

About ChromeOS

Security

Open Development

Boot Speed

ChromeOS in Summary

• The OS is Chrome, basically
• All apps are web-based
• There's no permanent local storage and everything is stored on the Internet
  
• But thumb drives are supported
• Local config and cache are encrypted
  
• File browsing is done from within Chrome
• Music and videos, too
• There's no printing
• The OS is self-repairing at boot, probably limiting the customization
• But it's largely open source so you can customize and compile your own
• "They want, wherever feasible, to build on existing components and tools from the open source community without unnecessary re-invention. This clear focus should benefit a wide variety of existing projects and we welcome it."[1]
• x86 and AMD64 are supported now
• ARM support is "coming soon."

Here is the system daemon-type info:

• D-Bus: The browser uses D-Bus to interact with the rest of the system. Examples of this include the battery meter and network picker. 
• Connection Manager: Provides a common API for interacting with the network devices, provides a DNS proxy, and manages network services for 3G, wireless, and ethernet.  
• WPA Supplicant: Used to connect to wireless networks.
• Autoupdate: Our autoupdate daemon silently installs new system images. 
• Power Management: (ACPI on Intel) Handles power management events like closing the lid or pushing the power button. 
• xscreensaver: Handles screen locking when the machine is idle. 
• Standard Linux services: NTP, syslog, and cron.

Security Model

• Process sandboxing
  
• Mandatory access control implementation that limits resource, process, and kernel interactions
• Control group device filtering and resource abuse constraint
• Chrooting and process namespacing for reducing resource and cross-process attack surfaces
• Media device interposition to reduce direct kernel interface access from Chromium browser and plugin processes
  
• Toolchain hardening to limit exploit reliability and success
• NX, ASLR, stack cookies, etc
• Kernel hardening and configuration paring
  
• Additional file system restrictions
• Read-only root partition
• tmpfs-based /tmp
• User home directories that can't have executables, privileged executables, or device nodes
• Longer term, additional system enhancements will be pursued, like driver sandboxing

How encryption works

In a nutshell, each user gets an encrypted image file in a hidden directory that is created at her first login. Thereafter, each time she logs in, the encrypted image is unlocked and made available for use. On logout or reboot, the user's data is locked away again. On some logouts, the encrypted image may be compacted. This step minimizes data loss due to file system fragmentation inside the image.

Find out more at the ChromiumOS site.

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Rossifer Lays Out Google's Strategy -- Must Read!!!

Image via CrunchBase

In a Slashdot story on Google Wave, Rossifer commented on Google's business strategy. He claims to work at Google, making the post extremely iformative, but this is the Intarweb so the post could merely be amazingly insightful. Either way, it's something that needs to be read enough that I included it in this blog despite the post not being about Ubuntu, Debian, or anything remotely related to them.

What you're not seeing is Google's strategic intent (I work for Google, but this stuff is public).

Google's goal is to commodify (reduce the marginal profit to zero) of everything that they don't make money on. The hardware is pretty much commodified already. Plenty of competitors and the profit margins are razor thin. Next levels are the OS and the applications. These are not yet commodified due to Microsoft's aggressively maintained monopoly. Contrary to common knowledge, Microsoft's real monopoly is in the Office file formats. From that, they've levered a monopoly into basic individual productivity applications and then (with Apple's cooperation) the operating system. They are also a serious player in second-generation collaboration tools (extensions to basic email).

In order to reduce Microsoft's war chest and eliminate their competitiveness, Google seeks to lower the profit margin on everything Microsoft currently produces at a profit (Windows and Office). So they produce a cheaper operating system, cheaper productivity applications, and cheaper collaboration tools (ideally free to the typical user). Google doesn't need to make money (though breaking even would be nice), Google just needs to apply pressure to Microsoft to cut their revenues/profits and the strategic goals are being met.

Writing apps that run on Windows? Doesn't help Google very much (though SketchUp and Picasa and a few other things are native apps).
Writing protocols that run on any machine? Helps Google a lot.
Writing web applications that use those protocols and run on any machine? Helps Google a lot.

Look at the bigger picture. Google is acting extremely rationally here.
As for whether Wave is innovative or not, I don't think you've tried it and are speaking without informing yourself. Wave is to email as email is to snail mail (single addressee, no broadcast, etc.). Wave tackles the problem of a widely CC:'d email with an attached Word or Excel document (two threads of changes: one in the email thread, one in the document) (multiple obsolete copies of the document available) (possible confusion and delay as people are added to the thread and have to re-read the history duplicated in most of the recent emails). Wave creates a "place" for this discussion/collaborative authoring to happen and then let's everyone bring whatever they want to help out. Wave is not email++ (which is what Outlook and Gmail are).

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Google Playing Around with a Flash-free YouTube

Image via CrunchBase

HTML5 and the video tag mean that the next generation of browsers won't need a plug-in to play video. Firefox 3.5 already has this, and Mozilla has put its weight behind OGG Theora, even though the HTML5 spec doesn't specify right now what containers or codecs should be used. H.264 originally beat out Theora in tests, but recent advancements in Theora, partially funded by Mozilla, have reversed the outcome.

Google's not blind to these events, and has coded up a Flash-free version of YouTube, using the video tag instead.

"This is an experiment," Google vice president of engineering Vic Gundotra told developers. "We are not announcing today that YouTube will be built this way. But we wanted to show it to you to get your creative juices flowing."

Google is wholeheartedly  supporting HTML5 and ECMAScript as the way forward and is trying to reduce the need for proprietary plug-ins, first by using HTML and ECMAScript for extensions, then by creating an HTML5 version of GMail for phones, and finally with this new, Flash-free YouTube.

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Random Thoughts on Random Tech Stories

Some interesting tech stories from this week and a little commentary.

1. Facebook value plummets $5bn
   Facebook is ad-driven. The ad market is down. Shock!
2. Apple counts $1bn for mystery data center
   Twice the cost of the average Google data center: XServes cost twice as much as the average Google server. ;)
3. Ubuntu AppCenter and Android apps on Ubuntu
   The App Center (in other words, an app store) is now high priority for 9.10, and UDS is showing off Android apps. Hmmmm. These couldn't be related in any way, could they?
4. UNR doesn't have vision
   Summary: Netbooks aren't small notebooks. We need to treat them differently and the Internet has to be woven into every interface.
   Take: I agree on the intent of using a netbook, but the market (and I mean customers) dont, and are pushing to make them small, cheap notebooks. Good luck changing their minds.
5. Free software will kill Redmond
   Redmond ain't dying any time soon, folks. There's one real truth here, though: Free and Open Source software are going to destroy 90% of the market for software sales (not implying that total software-related income will drop). Once a class of app is commoditized in FOSS, you'll need good luck selling a license for similar software. What will be left? Niche markets and service contracts (including web services).
6. Linux desktop adoption "easier than expected"
   The Linux desktop is ready for the enterprise. Businesses have the ability to start with more amenable groups and expand the roll-out later. Once the change is obviously permanent, people deal with the change.
7. Video Editing On Linux: Things are looking up!
   Keep holding your breath. Don't start breathing yet. Pitivi is still massively buggy, but it's getting there.
   

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