95% of the people i've talked with, including some instructors, lovely though they are (really, everyone comes off as genuine and nice and very intelligent), seem to look on blogs with a) derision b) confusion c) fear or d) a mix of all three.
also, i am one of three new media students.
out of 170.
blogging, ho!
things i've learned from grad school in my first two days:
language is hard.
i am dumb.
me go drink beer now.
A lot of people seem to be wildly misinterpreting the Google Secure Access initiative that I wrote about this morning.
Despite Om Malik's high-profile (and if you ask me, ridiculous) prediction of a few weeks ago, Google is NOT getting into the "business" of providing free wifi to everyone. Reuters & co. seem to have seen "Google" and "wifi" within a sentence of each other and not bothered to read any further. But Google isn't becoming an ISP — they're just offering a free VPN.
Why are they doing this? For the same reason they offer GMail and the Google Web Accelerator: to drive more of your personal web traffic through their servers. They can then analyze it (check the terms of service!) in order to better profile you, which in turn allows them to better target you for ads, which in turn lets them make more money.
It's a pretty straightforward model, and it makes sense. It's basically a glorified version of your supermarket's discount card program. And yes, I think those are a nasty, evil mechanism with the potential to violate privacy, discriminate against the poor, and (most likely) steal your thoughts via secret government satellites. Google's no different from these other privacy brokers, and eventually their shareholders are going to start complaining that the company's "Don't Be Evil" motto puts them at a competitive disadvantage. For now, though, the consumer gets a lot in return for surrendering their privacy.
Still — what if tomorrow Google started selling public access to GMail users' email for a buck an hour in a "best of Craigslist" sort of setup? What would you do? How would you get your messages out of their system? I don't have good answers to these questions, and it makes me uneasy. Relying on the continued benevolence of a company — particularly a publicly-traded one — is not a position in which any of us should want to be.
UPDATE: And yes, I realize that running a free ISP would be a great way to capture users' traffic. But others have tried it and failed — usually while actually placing additional ads in front of the user (ala NetZero). That's far more profitable than simply showing better ads. It's true that running a wifi ISP would be cheaper than the dialups that failed. And I wouldn't be surprised to see Google partner with a business to provide free wifi, or perhaps get involved in a municipal project or two. But the sort of vast wireless GoogleNet that Malik posits seems very unlikely to me.
UPDATE 2: I should point out that the Craigslist example is probably unrealistic. As noted in section 5 here, you retain the copyright to your emails. The point is just meant to be general: Google is in a position to do a number of evil things, should they decide to.
It's Catherine who's intent on banning all of our friends from leaving comments. Evil, evil Catherine!
(This is my way of saying comments are fixed again.)
An interesting new release from Google — they now offer software to help you secure your wifi connection. Put briefly, it seems to install a virtual network adapter representing a VPN connection to Google, then redirect all your traffic through it. It's very similar to OpenVPN's setup, except that the installation is smoother, and of course Google is providing the VPN backend.
I haven't tested its throughput, but I can confirm that it doesn't require wifi. So for those of you daunted by my SSH howto, this could be a good, easy solution (until your IT department starts blocking it, that is). Oh, and Aaron: this will probably let you get around MLB.com's policy of blacking out webcasts of Nats games for DC-area IP addresses (all of your traffic will appear to be coming from Google's servers). It may not be fast enough for streaming video, but it's worth a shot.
For those interested, it looks like the program sets up the connection over SSL — from there Ethereal seems to think that it's sending data out using compressed PPP, which doesn't make a whole lot of sense to me (I thought PPP was a protocol that runs under TCP/IP, not over it). Maybe someone with better networking credentials can fill me in on how this works.
UPDATE: Of course, now I realize that it's PPTP — tunneled PPP. Which is one of the two big VPN standards. Nothing unusual here. PPTP is encapsulated in TCP/IP and sent to the host. Wikipedia's got something about it here, although the GRE portion of the protocol remains less than clear.
