Apr 12
28
LinkedIn Fail
Well it was bound to happen. Any sufficiently large social interaction site eventually gets to a point of diminishing returns for its core users. Unfortunately it seems that LinkedIn has achieved such a status as of April 2012.
Much like Facebook, Friendster, Digg, mySpace, and a myriad of other sites that have come and gone, LinkedIn is now in the death spiral of irrelevance. Oh sure Facebook is worth billions on paper today, but so was AOL when it purchased Time Warner years ago. There is a difference between raw user numbers, and relevance to the trendmakers.
Isn’t LinkedIn the most relevant of all the social networks? Well that was true as recently as a year ago when they beat out Plaxo for the Business social network lead. However undisputed leadership brings with it, growing pains and lack of focus. Most large companies have gone through this cycle, and in the internet world, they rarely come out alive. For LinkedIn the problems started when they decided to be all things to all people. If Facebook was doing it, LinkedIn wanted to do it, but in a ‘business’ way. This was a departure from what made LinkedIn of last decade successful.
LinkedIn used to be a fairly simple, low feature set, site to connect with people you were trading business cards with. This way both of you could stay in touch if the others contact info, business info, or title changed. Great idea! And many people though it was worth using! In fact many of the early adopters, including myself, were very selective with their links. Sure sales people were generally happy to connect with just about anyone, but thous of us in non-sales roles tended to keep the connections as a digital record of meetings. Meaning that only connection requests from actual people we met in real life were accepted. All other requests were sent to the spam folder. For a time LinkedIn supported this model, and even cracked down on people who would sent out connection requests which were turned down by more than one person. This was great since it meant the signal to noise ration was very good on LinkedIn. But then something changed.
LinkedIn started seeing itself not merely as a conduit for business people to get a hold of each others contact info, but as a social network. Maybe it was Facebook jealousy, maybe not, but the feature set started changing in 2010 and 2011. All of the sudden the focus was on groups – which were seldom used in the previous decade – and the front page changed to have a timeline of user posts, not just updates of their contact info. In short LinkedIn signal to noise ration started heading down hill. Along with the change in focus, more sales tools were created to allow communication of the 1:many variety, rather than the traditional 1:1 which was the standard on LinkedIn for years. Account access and tools for headhunters, I mean recruiters, also appeared. It was not common to receive build email from both sales people looking to sell you a widget as well as recruiters wanting to know if you’d like a job making widgets. The advertising on the site became more targeted – not necessarily a bad thing – indicating a greater focus on using LinkedIn as a marketing platform. In fact LinkedIn ads created by members and targeting their contacts was touted as a great new feature.
So what’s the problem? LinkedIn is still free, it’s at a point where almost everyone you meet has an account, and thankfully people still don’t post photos of cats.
Well honestly, LinkedIn is too much. What I need as a consultant and executive is the basic core functionality of LinkedIn from 5 years ago – with none of the new fluff!
Case in point – emailing people via LinkedIn has been a feature ever since I can remember. This is old functionality! Yet today I had lost over an hour of time in trying to email my contacts about an upcoming event because LinkedIn kept having the following problems:
Your address book is currently unavailable. Please check again later.
Groups are currently unavailable. Please try later.
Grouping people by Tags looked like it worked, but tags were empty.
Why are features which have been around, and worked just fine for many years, all of the sudden having problems? Because LinkedIn has tried to be everything to everyone, and as a result it now does nothing particularly well. If servers get overloaded by people adding thousands of contacts who they have never met, LinkedIn gives them CPU and bandwidth to do it. If there are now as many posts in the ‘stream’ being generated in LinkedIn as on Facebook, resources are being used at a much higher rate. Even with more developers on staff, the maintenance of a large code base supporting all the new social network features means less time is spent optimizing and troubleshooting basic functions like mailing your own contacts.
In a word, LinkedIn has Failed to focus on the core features which made early adopters choose it as a preferred way to stay in touch. At this point LinkedIn offers little that can not be done with Google Plus. In fact all of my contacts are ALREADY in Google Plus from the first time I send them an email via gmail. I can control who sees what, and the contact info they choose to share gets updated in the background so I always have the latest info.
Is it time to ditch LinkedIn? Maybe. I will keep using it for the rest of the year as I search for an alternate solution either from a new, hungry start-up that sees LinkedIn as a slow, fat, now established provider ripe for stealing customers by giving them an agile, simple solution that LinkedIn once was. Or perhaps Google can win this battle too. Time will tell, but one thing is certain.
After 7 years on LinkedIn, it has stopped being relevant to me.
Jul 11
29
Optical Shmoptical
Apple introduced an update to the Mini line a few days ago. Among improvements in CPU, Thunderbolt port, and a lack of an optical drive. While this may have been a quite introduction barely making a whimper to some of us, it was a raison d’etre for dozens of journalists to bash Apple and Steve Jobs about being incompetent and shortsighted in getting rid of an optical technology everyone uses!
Well guess what, not everyone! I for one have only used the optical drive in my MBP17 once in the last 12 months – and that was to re-install the OS on a new HD. Of course starting with Lion, even that process will no longer require a DVD be inserted. Honestly I have not used a DVD burner on my PC for closer to 3 years – so its not that I’m a Mac fan boy, but rather that I’ve ‘moved on’ from optical. I’ve moved on to getting a 50Mbps connection to the internet, and using that speed to its fullest. I can stream Netflix and Amazon to multiple TVs, have virtually instant MP3 – mostly podcast – downloads, buy games via Steam (for several years now with the bonus of no copy protection that the DVD versions used to have!) and software in the App Store on the Mac and iOS.
I used to backup on DVDs in the past, but as data sizes grew it became tedious to do so. While some would say that internet speeds are still not fast enough to backup at the speed of a DVD or Bluuray, I would remind them that done properly, a backup will run automatically, in the background, all the time. That means no more babysitting disk changes, storing stacks upon stacks of physical disks, or getting corrupt files because your burner had some dust in it. My current strategy is to use local, large RAID backup ala Windows Home Server for all files, and then using a combination of several cloud backup packages like iDisk and Amazon Elastic Storage for the ‘important’ files.
I don’t bother backing up my multi gig movie collection – all ripped from disks I purchased and happily threw away years ago – because I can watch most, if not all of the movies on streaming services now if I were to ever loose the local archive. Most everything else, including all original content I produce is considered ‘important’ and so is backed up in the cloud – or more precisely multiple clouds.
Having a fast internet connection makes all this possible, and frankly it fits nicely in line with my goals of slimming down the amount of computer junk I have at the house. I used to take pride in having a half dozen PCs whirring away heating up the house, but after many years of electric bills and dealing with maintenance and failures of hardware, I’m happy to outsource all that to a 3rd party while getting streaming, rather than local access, to some content.
Ironically, the single biggest use of the US population, and my, internet bandwidth is watching movies – the very thing optical drives (ok well starting with DVDs) were created for.
So do new Macs need optical drives? Absolutely not! Unless the purchaser is stuck in the last decade of internet connectivity.
Much like the floppies which were removed in favor of CD/DVD drives a decade ago by Apple iMacs, all opticals are now getting removed from the new Apple line. They have become redundant, as the Brits say. Apple just happens to be the first company to recognize that fact – and I applaud them for it.
This is at least in part a response to the Engadget article about the folly of the new Mac Mini not including an optical drive. http://www.engadget.com/2011/07/27/editorial-apples-officially-over-the-optical-drive-for-better/9
Posted in Hardware by .
Jun 11
3
No touch is good touch!
I love my Apple touch devices like the iPhone and iPad… but, this whole notion of getting rid of the mouse (track-pad/stylus/etc) is ridiculous. If you want precision movement, you need something other than a fingertip to use. If you want to click small buttons or, god forbid, actually see what you are clicking, then you need something other than a fingertip.
Sure the iPad is intuitive and the 3D touch interface ala Minority Report looks cool (until your arms get tired like professors who spent hours at a chalkboard will tell you) but realistically none of thous is ideal for tasks we do on computers.
Short of having a neural interface for touch free control, the best devices allow the arm, hand and fingers to rest – while being able to translate minimal finger movement into cursor movement. A minimalist mouse can be imagined as a ring on your finger with a pen cap clip coming out of it past your finger tip giving you point cursor control with just finger movement. A touch-pad will do the same thing as far as small movement, but is less accurate due to the large relative size of your finger contact area. Rolling your finger on a touch-pad will move the cursor and that is less than precise.
If you want to move a cursor over an image on the screen, the last thing you want to do is cover up part of the screen with your hand, and the point you are hovering over with a finger!
Of course, the iPad does work with direct touch input, but native buttons are over-sized and non-native elements like websites end up being a luck-of-the draw as to whether or not you click on the right link area. We don’t need to give up accuracy on the big screen (or screens!) of a computer.
Yes I like touch in some situations, like contact or schedule management, but I hate it for others like spreadsheets or editing photos! I use a Mac with 27in screens and a PC with 2x24in screens for a reason – I want more real-estate for editing and I don’t want to be waving my hands all around to do it!
I also have a Kinect with the hand gesture interface. That application works well for games and excersize, but again keep in mind you are not doing the same detailed tasks on an XBOX that you are on a computer! Leave it to Microsoft to dumb down the interface at a time when technology allows for more and more detailed control.
I’ll happily keep my Logitech mouse and Wacom tablet on computers and leave the fingerprint generating input for the iPad and iPhone!
Note: this article is in response to http://techcrunch.com/2011/06/03/windows-ate-the-mouse/
Like many security conscious professionals I use Google Chrome. I use it on both the Mac and Win flavors (I use firefox on linux, but that is another story) because it is faster and because its sandbox has been rock solid.
Today I read a story about VUPEN showing a demo of the Chrome hack where they were able to get Calculator executing on a Win box via a Chrome sandbox exploit. [News Link] While it is no surprise that yet another piece of software gets hacked, it is a little disappointing that the product was Chrome – although I mostly use Chrome on a Mac and the exploit for now is Windows only. Much more disappointing though is the news that the French hacker group security company VUPEN plans on keeping the details of the vulnerability secret from Google, while at the same time providing that information to their government clients.
Generally the debate for white hat security researchers is about disclosure only to the software company affected, or to the whole world including the software company. In this case the debate is about disclosure to a small private list of government clients but not the software company, or to the small private list and the software company.
I’m all for mercantilism, as well as for rewarding the countless hours security researchers spend dissecting assembly code to find an exploit, however in this case I see the VUPEN behavior as being no different than blackhat 0-day hacker groups. They wanted to have their cake and eat it too by getting free publicity for finding the exploit and keeping the details of the exploit a secret from Google. Furthermore they are willing to effectively sell the exploit to their government clients – hmm… China comes to mind!
Is this really the SOP of a serious security research firm?
Or is this just 1/2 a step removed from the practices of Russian hackers who routinely sell exploits on IRC channels to the highest bidder (paying with stolen creditcards?!) While the technical acumen of VUPEN hackers may be extremely hight, the ethics of the organization are on the level of Viagra sellers and bot herders. Either they disclose the exploit to Google – along with their government clients - or they don’t disclose it, and then keep the information private w/o posting videos demonstrating the exploit in action. Doing what they did is the least desirable option and one which gives genuine white hat security researchers a bad name.
Apr 11
25
Why a VPN to the public internet?
Recently a friend of mine and I were having a conversation about the inability of our iPad/iPhone devices to connect to our aging VPN concentrators at home. Neither of us NEEDS to connect from those devices to a server at home, so it has not really been an issue, but it did get me thinking about VPN at home and why many IT people have it.
I am not going to make value judgements or agtument for or against why many IT and Security folks have VPN at the house, but I will summarize my observations.
In general a VPN connection is used to extend a private network, via a public network, to some remote location by means of an encrypted tunnel. This is generally used for remote offices and other similar connections. VPN at home came about in the 90s when the cost of used equipment came down and many IT employees started building home networks that contained similar devices to what they used at the office. As prices kept going down and availability of software-only solutions made it even easier, it seemed that by the 2000s many people who I knew in IT were running VPNs to their home. Most of them did not have the same needs as a remote corporate office for a VPN, instead they used the VPN as a privacy tunnel to be able to get to the public internet via the VPN from corporate locations.
But if they could establish a VPN session then couldn’t they already get to the internet?
Well yes they could get out to the internet, but by 2000 many companies had installed proxy servers to monitor web access and provide a mail gateway. Many non-standard ports were blocked at the firewall level and by the late 2000s DLP was starting to be implemented to monitor email communication. Rightly or wrongly some of the more tech savvy employees had figured out that having a VPN tunnel at home was a better method of bypassing ‘big brother’ than alternatives.
Additionally many companies, recognizing a need in employee satisfaction for allowing iPod and smart phone wifi connectivity, enabled separate guest networks which sometimes were actually used by company guests, but predominantly used by employee personal devices. While this allowed for separation of personal devices from corporate traffic for the company, it generally meant traffic goes through an even more restrictive proxy and firewall. Here again the ability of a device to establish a privacy tunnel via VPN meant that thous people with their own VPN concentrators could have privacy while using the guest network. As I said I am not arguing for or against this, but I have observed this process in many fortune 50 companies over the last decade.
As a result of my conversation with my friend I decided to do some research and found that not only are there services that provide VPN endpoints with full public internet access, but that they are cheap! So cheap that I estimate my own aged VPN concentrator costs more to operate in electricity than signing up for one of these services for under $5 a month. Additionally I discovered that one of the oldest such VPN end point companies has been providing this service for 8+ years and that they ensure it works with iPad/iPhone devices.
I don’t have a great need for a VPN to the internet, but for $5 a month I could turn off my own black box device and have something available if I was truly concerned about privacy. I found the endpoint selection broad and the speed perfectly acceptable – although slower than native net speed on the devices w/o a VPN tunnel running.
Check out ibVPN if you want to have completely private access from anywhere.
