Posts tagged Responds
StumbleUpon Responds To Concerns About Links & Iframing
Feb 3rd
On Wednesday, Feb 1, 2012, we published an article discussing some changes StumbleUpon made during their recent redesign which removed source links from their content pages and forced all users to view content from the site through an iframed toolbar, which they could not close if they were logged…
Please visit Search Engine Land for the full article.
View full post on Search Engine Land: News & Info About SEO, PPC, SEM, Search Engines & Search Marketing
Google Responds to Privacy Policy Backlash: Don’t Log In
Jan 30th
For years legislators, privacy advocates, and the FTC have suggested Google simplify its privacy policies. In consolidating policies associated with various Google products, it stands to reason the company believed it was satisfying such requests.
View full post on Search Engine Watch – Latest
Hacker News and the Damage Done? 10gen Responds on MongoDB
Nov 9th
Mark Twain said, “a lie is halfway around the world before the truth can get its boots on.” The speed of putting on boots (if you wear them) hasn’t changed much since Twain’s day, but lies and misinformation are getting a serious boost out of the Internet. Consider the post about MongoDB that made it all over the Net this weekend thanks to being voted up on Hacker News.
In short, the anonymous Pastebin post slams MongoDB saying “I now feel a kind of social responsibility to deter people from banking their business on MongoDB” and then lists reasons why MongoDB is a bad choice. Sounds like typical HN front-page material, right?
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The problem is, the veracity of the original piece is in question. True, false, or a mix of both – it made it to the front page of Hacker News very quickly. Who knows how many folks have read it since then? Certainly a lot more folks than have read the comments thread or the follow-up from the poster claiming “it is in fact a hoax that has gone too far, you got trolled.”
“A lie is halfway around the world before the truth can get its boots on.” – Mark Twain
To be fair, a lot of the people on the HN thread don’t seem to have taken the post at face value. There’s also been effort to spread the response from 10gen alongside the original post.
A Grain of Truth?
To 10gen’s credit, Eliot Horowitz (CTO) was in the thread and responding to the post right away on a point-by-point basis. Even more, Horowitz respected the forum and wasn’t spinning the usual corporate response. Even though Horowitz had clues the poster was trolling (the original post has something about having a “crazy platinum support contract,” which Horowitz debunks), he did acknowledge some of the actual problems that exist or have existed with MongoDB.
I also spoke with Horowitz and 10gen president Max Schireson yesterday about the post and problems with MongoDB. Again, rather than deflecting the entire thing, Schireson and Horowitz were fairly candid about MongoDB’s shortcomings. Of the nine sections, Schireson says that “some are definitely valid, some we haven’t heard or seen.”
For instance, Schireson says that the complaint about the global lock is a “well-known deficiency,” but “something we’re working on to improve.”
The biggie for any database, of course, is data loss. Is that an issue? Not anymore, says Schireson, but there were issues prior to 1.8. “If you only used a single server, then there were reliability issues where you might lose data. We tried to clearly document that, and make clear that the recommended approach was to use multiple servers to achieve reliability.” Since 1.8, says Schireson, “we do not believe there have been substantiated reports of data loss when the system is used in the recommended way.”
Perhaps surprisingly, Schireson didn’t seem too upset with the post. “I tend to rely on users to be pretty smart and sophisticated.” Schireson admits that it “created some FUD for us.” But, looking at the response and comments voted to the top, Schireson says that most users seemed to be examining the issue pretty carefully.
So should users avoid MongoDB? I’d say they should take the same approach as the HN skeptics: evaluate it and find out for yourself. It does sound like MongoDB, being a relatively new project, has some sharp edges. But given some of the success stories (such as Foursquare), it’s clear that MongoDB can also be used successfully in production for large data sets.
The System Works?
Sites like Hacker News are a blessing and a curse for dissemination of news. The good news is that they can provide a platform for information and viewpoints that wouldn’t otherwise be heard. (Though HN these days is less and less non-mainstream.) The bad is there’s little editorial quality control.
A single-sourced, anonymous, piece like this one wouldn’t (or at least shouldn’t) be making the front page of widely read publications.
But the reaction on HN is heartening. Though it’s disappointing it made it to the front page at all, it also seems that the bulk of the audience at HN took it with the grain of salt it deserved.
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Amazon Responds to Silk Privacy Concerns, Says Cloud Acceleration is Optional
Oct 18th
When Amazon launched its Kindle Fire tablet last month, it sparked discussions among most tech enthusiasts and bloggers over things like whether or not they’d buy one and whether the new device should be seen as a competitor to Apple’s tirelessly dominant iPad. One detail about what Amazon unveiled was cause for concern for some.
Silk, the Web browser that will ship with the new tablet, utilizes Amazon’s powerful cloud computing infrastructure to help serve up Web pages faster and even predict your browsing habits. Naturally, this split architecture and its potential to capture private user data caught the attention of organizations like the Electronic Frontier Foundation, who inquired with Amazon about the privacy implications Silk presents.
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The EFF got some answers late last week, and the organization was largely reassured by what it heard. Perhaps most importantly, Amazon noted that Silk’s cloud acceleration feature is optional. Users can easily turn it off in their settings if they would prefer that Silk load pages like a standard Web browser.
Amazon also said that even when it’s turned on, Silk’s cloud acceleration would not affect pages secured with SSL. Thus any requests for any URL prefixed with HTTPS would not be passed through Amazon’s servers.
Finally, Amazon assures privacy advocates that the data it does capture is completely anonymized and that it cannot be linked to an individual or Amazon user account.
Some Privacy Concerns Persist
Still, the EFF is not 100% satisified with Amazon’s approach, although they said they are “generally satisfied with the privacy design of Silk.” They note that some URLs contain identifying information, and that some content cached on Amazon’s servers could as well. Even the aggregate, presumably anonymous browsing data Amazon will collect concerns the EFF, who says it could make “an attractive target for law enforcement.”
Members of the U.S. Congress have also started asking questions about Silk. Last week, lawmakers from both political parties pressed Amazon about the browser’s ability to track user behavior and what the company plans to do with the data it collects. Democratic Congressman Ed Markey gave Jeff Bezos three weeks to answer a letter containing a series of questions about the issue, while others pondered the necessity for legislation to protect consumers.
Either way, Amazon is set to start shipping the Kindle Fire on November 15. Any early adopters who are not convinced that their privacy is secured while using the device’s Web browser can turn the controversial setting off.
View full post on ReadWriteWeb
Hortonworks Responds: Counting Hadoop Code and Giving Credit Where Due
Oct 11th
Things are getting lively in the Hadoop community, especially between Hortonworks and Cloudera. The issue? Which companies are contributing the most to Hadoop, and how contributions ought to be tallied up.
It started with Owen O’Malley of Hortonworks, who did some calculations of contributions to Hadoop based on lines of code. The problem is that O’Malley credited work just by looking at the initial employer of contributors, rather than employers at the time of contribution.
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Patches or Lines of Code?
Mike Olson of Cloudera took another whack at the numbers, which I looked at last week. Olson broke out the numbers by looking at the patches contributed to Hadoop and its ecosystem (projects like HBase, ZooKeeper, Pig, Mahout and Oozie).
O’Malley has come back with a counter-post that tallies contributions by lines of code but sticking to Cloudera’s method of counting current employer. The result shows Hortonworks far ahead of Cloudera, Facebook, IBM and even Yahoo. For 2011, according to O’Malley, Hortonworks has contributed more than 42% of the lines of code to Hadoop, Yahoo nearly 26%, and Cloudera a bit more than 15%. Lines of code are a better measure, says O’Malley, because “patches differ in their investment of time and effort.” (Of course, the same thing can be said about a line of code, too.)
Finally, O’Malley does provide a comparison that looks at patches and lines of code since 2006 and another comparison for 2011 alone. This puts Cloudera in a much better light, with nearly 30% of patches in 2011 so far, compared to 25% for Hortonworks and about 23% for Yahoo.
Lively Competition
If you’re going to be comparing contributions, I think that the best way is to sum up patches and lines of code. There’s really no concrete way to objectively say “company Y absolutely contributed the most” to a project just by counting code. A company’s code contribution might be a small code drop that adds a killer feature. A company’s contribution may be a series of patches that effectively removes thousands of lines of code, but improves the project with better code.
I think it’s safe to say that Cloudera and Hortonworks are both providing a good showing when it comes to Hadoop contributions, regardless of which company is actually contributing the most. And the results show that Hadoop is getting contributions from a healthy group of companies.
View full post on ReadWriteWeb
New SEO and Social Media Success Online Seminar Responds to Popular Demand – Benzinga
May 26th
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New SEO and Social Media Success Online Seminar Responds to Popular Demand
Benzinga The brand new SEO and Social Media Success Online Seminar responds to popular demand to help marketers improve their SEO & Social Media Marketing strategies and gain greater online visibility. The online training event offers a top-notch SEO and Social … New SEO and Social Media Success Online Seminar Responds to Popular Demand |
View full post on SEO – Google News
New SEO and Social Media Success Online Seminar Responds to Popular Demand – PR Web (press release)
May 26th
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New SEO and Social Media Success Online Seminar Responds to Popular Demand
PR Web (press release) The brand new SEO and Social Media Success Online Seminar responds to popular demand to help marketers improve their SEO & Social Media Marketing strategies and gain greater online visibility. The online training event offers a top-notch SEO and Social … |
View full post on SEO – Google News
Facebook Responds to Abused DMCA Loophole Issue, Doesn’t Fix System
Apr 29th
Yesterday we reported on a problem that was affecting several Facebook page owners – due to a loophole in Facebook’s process for handling DMCA takedown requests, anyone with an ax to grind and a fake email address could take down any Facebook page by filling out an online form with false information, claiming copyright infringement.
Facebook doesn’t verify the identity of those filing the claim, and more importantly, it doesn’t verify the claim is from a legitimate email address. After a handful of high-profile sites became the victim of this problem, Facebook has stepped in to resolve the problem. Well, sort of. The social networking company says it has restored four pages, but it has not made any changes to its system as of yet.
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What Was Happening?
With Facebook’s faulty system, which we detailed here, anyone could get a Facebook page taken down just by filling out an online form with fake information. Because Facebook did not verify the email address of the person doing the reporting, several page owners found themselves without any way to resolve the dispute. In some cases, the fake email addresses the scammer had entered ended up belonging to an uninvolved third-party, who, fortunately for the site owner (Taimur Asad of RedmondPie), was kind enough to contact Facebook on the owner’s behalf to have the claim removed. Others, like Hamard Dar, who owns a site called Rewriting Technology, were not as lucky. His page was down for over a month. He was only able to restore it by performing an investigation on his own to determine who submitted the complaint and then threaten them with criminal charges.
Facebook’s Response
In light of the controversy, Facebook has now responded to these complaints, saying that it has “investigated a number of recent intellectual property cases and have restored four pages as a result.”
Yes, just four.
The spokesperson also added:
Abuse of DMCA and other intellectual property notice procedures is a challenge for every major Internet service and we take it seriously. We have invested significant resources into creating a dedicated team that uses specialized tools, systems and technology to review and properly handle intellectual property notices. This system evaluates a number of factors when deciding how to respond and, in many cases, we require the reporter to provide additional information before we can take action. As a result of these efforts, the vast majority of intellectual property notices that we receive are handled without incident. Of course, no system is perfect and we are always striving to improve our practices. As such, we will be considering the results of our investigation into this matter as we continue to refine our systems and procedures.
How Many Others are Out There?
Unfortunately, this response is not good enough for others who are still dealing with the effects of Facebook’s failed system.
According to Hassan Ali, who runs apniisp.com, a popular entertainment website based in Pakistan, his Facebook page with over 44,000 fans was disabled on March 3, 2011, and the email address belonging to the supposedly infringed upon party is not even working – all the emails just bounce back.
This goes to one of the main issues with Facebook’s system – it doesn’t even verify the email address works. In addition, Facebook’s support in this area doesn’t help the affected parties – form letters from what appear to be bots called “Reggie” and “Marissa” are the only “people” who will respond to emails asking for help. And they always say the same thing: Facebook won’t get involved, work it out yourself and get a lawyer.
But in Ali’s case, Facebook isn’t even listening to his legal counsel, he says. In an excerpt from Facebook’s email, the company writes,
“If you believe that this claim has been made under false pretenses, we recommend that you contact a lawyer or your local law enforcement agency and discuss this issue with them.”
But when Ali’s lawyer contacted Facebook on his behalf, Facebook replied:
“We can only correspond with an admin of the removed content.”
Ali says he has been struggling with this issue for 50 days and doesn’t know what do to anymore.
Restoring Pages is a Band-Aid, Not a Solution
While the four site owners affected were glad to see their pages return, the brand reputation they suffered is, in some cases, irreversible. In one instance, a new, fake Facebook page had appeared, offering the newly migrated fans “free iPads,” in what was clearly an online scam.
When asked what Facebook was doing in the future to address this issue, as simply restoring the pages of those bloggers notable enough to have caused a ruckus doesn’t fix the real problem, Facebook told one of the site owners that the issue would be discussed and Facebook will “consider refinements to our system.”
Consider?
How hard is it to implement email validation? What’s to consider? At the very least, the form should verify the email address works before removing pages based on faulty claims. At best, Facebook should make it more challenging for these claims to exist in the first place. A good first step? Stop allowing disposable webmail addresses in the “email” portion of the field.
We expect that this isn’t the last we’ll hear of changes to the DMCA takedown system over at Facebook. In the meantime, can someone besides “Marissa” or “Reggie” please look into Ali’s case?
View full post on ReadWriteWeb
Apple Finally Responds to iPhone Location Tracking Issue
Apr 27th
It’s been a week since data scientists Alasdair Allan and Pete Warden published their discovery that the iPhone has been keeping track of users’ locations and storing the data – unencrypted – on the phone as well as any machine with which you sync the device.
Although the news spread like wildfire, Apple has remained silent until now. The company has finally issued a statement on its collection and use of location data. We’ve reprinted the press release in full below.
Apple insists it is not tracking the location of your iPhone. “Apple has never done so and has no plans to ever do so.” It maintains that what Warden and Allan found was a database of Wi-Fi hotspots and celltowers around your current location, information that will help your iPhone quickly calculate your location when requested.
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Despite insisting that it’s innocent of any accusations of tracking users, Apple says it plans to issue a software update soon that will change how much data is stored (just seven days’ worth, which will be encrypted), will end caching this data when the device is synced, and will actually cease if users turn off location services.
In the end, Apple seems to be agreeing with what we first thought of the consolidated.db file: more negligence than nefariousness.
Apple would like to respond to the questions we have recently received about the gathering and use of location information by our devices.
1. Why is Apple tracking the location of my iPhone?
Apple is not tracking the location of your iPhone. Apple has never done so and has no plans to ever do so.
2. Then why is everyone so concerned about this?
Providing mobile users with fast and accurate location information while preserving their security and privacy has raised some very complex technical issues which are hard to communicate in a soundbite. Users are confused, partly because the creators of this new technology (including Apple) have not provided enough education about these issues to date.
3. Why is my iPhone logging my location?
The iPhone is not logging your location. Rather, it’s maintaining a database of Wi-Fi hotspots and cell towers around your current location, some of which may be located more than one hundred miles away from your iPhone, to help your iPhone rapidly and accurately calculate its location when requested. Calculating a phone’s location using just GPS satellite data can take up to several minutes. iPhone can reduce this time to just a few seconds by using Wi-Fi hotspot and cell tower data to quickly find GPS satellites, and even triangulate its location using just Wi-Fi hotspot and cell tower data when GPS is not available (such as indoors or in basements). These calculations are performed live on the iPhone using a crowd-sourced database of Wi-Fi hotspot and cell tower data that is generated by tens of millions of iPhones sending the geo-tagged locations of nearby Wi-Fi hotspots and cell towers in an anonymous and encrypted form to Apple.
4. Is this crowd-sourced database stored on the iPhone?
The entire crowd-sourced database is too big to store on an iPhone, so we download an appropriate subset (cache) onto each iPhone. This cache is protected but not encrypted, and is backed up in iTunes whenever you back up your iPhone. The backup is encrypted or not, depending on the user settings in iTunes. The location data that researchers are seeing on the iPhone is not the past or present location of the iPhone, but rather the locations of Wi-Fi hotspots and cell towers surrounding the iPhone’s location, which can be more than one hundred miles away from the iPhone. We plan to cease backing up this cache in a software update coming soon (see Software Update section below).
5. Can Apple locate me based on my geo-tagged Wi-Fi hotspot and cell tower data?
No. This data is sent to Apple in an anonymous and encrypted form. Apple cannot identify the source of this data.
6. People have identified up to a year’s worth of location data being stored on the iPhone. Why does my iPhone need so much data in order to assist it in finding my location today?
This data is not the iPhone’s location data–it is a subset (cache) of the crowd-sourced Wi-Fi hotspot and cell tower database which is downloaded from Apple into the iPhone to assist the iPhone in rapidly and accurately calculating location. The reason the iPhone stores so much data is a bug we uncovered and plan to fix shortly (see Software Update section below). We don’t think the iPhone needs to store more than seven days of this data.
7. When I turn off Location Services, why does my iPhone sometimes continue updating its Wi-Fi and cell tower data from Apple’s crowd-sourced database?
It shouldn’t. This is a bug, which we plan to fix shortly (see Software Update section below).
8. What other location data is Apple collecting from the iPhone besides crowd-sourced Wi-Fi hotspot and cell tower data?
Apple is now collecting anonymous traffic data to build a crowd-sourced traffic database with the goal of providing iPhone users an improved traffic service in the next couple of years.
9. Does Apple currently provide any data collected from iPhones to third parties?
We provide anonymous crash logs from users that have opted in to third-party developers to help them debug their apps. Our iAds advertising system can use location as a factor in targeting ads. Location is not shared with any third party or ad unless the user explicitly approves giving the current location to the current ad (for example, to request the ad locate the Target store nearest them).
10. Does Apple believe that personal information security and privacy are important?
Yes, we strongly do. For example, iPhone was the first to ask users to give their permission for each and every app that wanted to use location. Apple will continue to be one of the leaders in strengthening personal information security and privacy.
Software Update
Sometime in the next few weeks Apple will release a free iOS software update that:
- reduces the size of the crowd-sourced Wi-Fi hotspot and cell tower database cached on the iPhone
- ceases backing up this cache, and
- deletes this cache entirely when Location Services is turned off.
In the next major iOS software release the cache will also be encrypted on the iPhone.
View full post on ReadWriteWeb
