One Password To Rule Them All And In The Darkness Bind Them

The giants of the web are fighting to become your de facto passport to the digital world.

These days we’ve all got too many passwords to remember. The likes of Facebook, Google and Microsoft want to ease your burden by letting you use their accounts to access all of your other services. A growing number of sites and services let you login with your Facebook details, for example, turning your Facebook account into your online identity card.

Facebook recently upped the stakes by striking a deal with Telstra to let pre-paid mobile customers access their account directly from Facebook. Telstra pre-paid customers can track their account balance, top up their credit and view usage history. Considering how much of a hassle it can be to deal with telcos, organising your phone bill via your Facebook account sounds pretty useful.

The Telstra deal is part of Facebook’s move beyond a simple “service” to become a “platform” on which other applications and services run. Game developers were quick to get onboard but Facebook wants to expand much further. Its aim is to develop a microcosm of the internet within Facebook’s walls, so in theory you never need to stray beyond Facebook’s grasp. Naturally this doesn’t sit well with the likes of Google and Microsoft who also have their own vast ecosystems and want to “own the customer”. Remember, if a service is free you’re often the product.

Of course Facebook and the others giants of the web aren’t introducing extra features such as phone bill management to make your life easier. They’re doing it to make sure that they’re so tightly entwined in your life that you can’t walk away. Facebook wants you to be too reliant on your account to abandon it. In return it gets to track what you do in every corner of your life.

Facebook and the others aren’t evil, they’re simply trading your privacy and personal information in return for convenience. It’s a reasonable trade to make if you comprehend what you’re trading and take the time to understand the various privacy settings. But Facebook does seem to benefit from the fact that many people don’t comprehend this transaction and think they’re getting everything for “free”.

Long before Facebook was on the scene, Microsoft dreamed of acting as our digital passports. Microsoft’s Hailstorm system was later renamed Microsoft Passport Network, .NET My Services and .NET Passport. You probably know it as a Hotmail account.

When Passport was integrated into Windows XP way back in 2001, Microsoft’s chief research and strategy officer Craig Mundie said the public would fully accept Microsoft as a trusted repository for all their personal information within five to 10 years. Clearly he was wrong about that one.

Of course Microsoft’s Passport efforts failed because most people trusted Microsoft about as far as they could kick their computer. Yet the concept of trust has changed considerably in the last decade. Today people trust the likes of Facebook and Google with a surprising amount of personal information. But it remains to be seen whether they’ll become our one password to rule them all.

Are You Ready for Google Drive?

Is it time for you to embrace online backup?

There are two kinds of hard drives — dead ones and those which are going to die. As such, if you don’t keep backup copies of your important files you could lose them all in a heartbeat. Fire, flood, theft, virus attack, hardware failure, power spike, natural disaster and plain old human error are just a few of the threats to your precious data. You’re at even greater risk if your important files are stored on a notebook, smartphone or tablet which is exposed to the rough and tumble of life on the road.

While you might be able to recover from the loss of some files, others are simply irreplaceable. For example, in the years to come there’ll be plenty of people with no baby photos after their parents lost everything in a high-tech disaster.

The simplest backup system is to copy your files to a USB stick or maybe a USB hard drive. If you’re trying to protect a few computers around the house you might upgrade to a Network Attached Storage drive. But these may not save you from fire or flood. Any disaster which claims your computer will most likely also claim the backup devices sitting in your desk drawer. For full protection you need to keep “offsite” copies of your files, safely stored far away from the originals.

This is where Google Drive comes into play, the latest online backup service which is built into every Google Gmail account. Google Drive offers 5GB of free storage, with the option to pay for more if you need it. You can upload your files via a web browser, but Google also offers free software which runs in the background on your computer and automatically uploads new or changed files. This kind of “set and forget” backup solution tends to offer the best protection for your data.

To be honest Google Drive is a little late on the scene and faces stiff competition from the likes of SkyDrive, DropBox, Jungle Disk, Mozy, Carbonite, Crashplan, SugarSync and others. Google Drive may particularly appeal to Mac users who are about to lose access to iDisk and are frustrated by the limitations of Apple’s new iCloud service.

If you don’t have offsite backups of your important data it’s worth experimenting with these different backup services. Start small, run a few tests and read the fine print before you commit yourself, as your first full backup will take a long time so you don’t want to change providers regularly. Keep an eye on your monthly data usage if your ISP counts uploads towards your monthly limit (be especially careful when using mobile broadband).

While the cloud is a handy place to keep your backups, it’s not foolproof either. For truly irreplaceable files such as family photos you might also want to keep offline backups burned to DVD, perhaps at home and/or safely stored at someone else’s house or your desk drawer at work.

Think of a backup system as an insurance policy for your data. You can never be too careful when it comes to things which can’t be replaced.

Google knows a lot about you, but is that a bad thing?

Google’s a company with an interesting history. It rode into prominence in the early part of the previous decade, largely on the back of a search engine — something that in itself was already a highly commoditised entity — that worked more quickly and effectively than the competing search engines of the day. Google isn’t without competition in the modern market — Microsoft’s Bing and Yahoo!’s search engines being the most prominent examples — but for many folks, Google is search.

In case you’re wondering, Google doesn’t just offer up search results for the fun of it; the vast bulk of Google’s income comes from advertising that hangs off the search results. Google got to where it is partly because its search results were good, but also because it could offer tailored and unobtrusive advertising that paid out; if you got ads in your search feed that were relevant to your interests, you were more likely to follow them up, and therefore everybody benefits — at least in theory.

Google also isn’t, according to one of its famous early promises, evil. To be precise, one of Google’s early company mottos exclaimed “Don’t be evil”, so that while you were handing over lots of information to Google in return for free search services — and later other offerings ranging from office software to calendars to social networking — you could rest easy that the company wasn’t trying to be evil, and your private data was safe and secure.

At least, that was the theory. Recent online uproar against Google has focused on a couple of Google’s most recent alterations to search and to its privacy polices. Firstly, in the area of search, Google’s started to give more prominence to results given a +1 mark through Google’s own Google+ social network. That’s a policy somewhat rife for abuse, but what’s got a lot more folks concerned are changes to Google’s privacy policies due to hit on the first of March. The full details of the new policy were announced on Google’s official blog here.

Google’s main product might be search, but a single Google account can link to RSS reading, email, calendar, documents, photos, YouTube and a plethora of other sites and services. Previously all the information within the bounds of one Google site stayed where it was, giving your data and preferences a certain quantity of relative anonymity. From March 1st, Google will start collating the data from one service against each other, building up a much more comprehensive profile of who you are and what you do than it did before. Technically speaking, Google already had all this information (or as much as you chose to give it); its new policy makes it explicit that it’ll leverage this information across all services. Google’s spin on this is that it’ll lead to a simpler overall Google experience, but there’s reason to be wary. Google’s sitting on an information goldmine — one perhaps not just relevant to simple advertising — and it’s one that users have largely handed to it for free. Cross-collated data in one single place also represents a tasty vector for attack by cyber criminals, although here at least we can hope that Google’s defences are good. Actually, given that an individual user can’t do much to improve Google’s security, that’s all we can do — hope that it’s up to the task.

2012’s Technology Secrets

As I’m writing this, the last few hours of 2011 are ticking away, taking with them one year while ushering in another. 2011’s been an interesting year in the technology world, with touch interfaces — whether on smartphones, tablets or touchscreen laptops and computers — a most notable feature that defined the consumer technology landscape. But what will 2012 bring us?

Any kind of prediction about the technology landscape is inevitably one that involves a certain amount of guesswork, and that means I could be hopelessly (or even haplessly) wrong with any kind of prediction that I make. With that caveat in mind, let’s jump headfirst into the crystal ball, taking a look at three industry heavyweights and how they might fare in 2012.

Apple gets first place in my tea leaf readings, purely on alphabetical grounds. Apple’s widely tipped to update its iPad, iPhone and Mac lines this year; those things are pretty inevitable simply from a marketing point of view. On the Mac front, new chipset availability will allow newer Mac models (the exact same thing is true on the PC front), and it doesn’t take a degree from the dubious institute-of-psychic-studies-that-I-just-made-up (established eight seconds ago) to suggest that new iPhones and iPads will see money flowing into Apple’s coffers. That kind of repeat business latest-model hype is exactly what Apple does, and based on previous years, that’s clearly what it’ll continue to do.

One rumour doing the rounds here at the moment is that Apple will unveil an “Apple” TV. Not to be confused with the small set top box that the company already sells, this would be an Apple branded TV set, hooked into the iTunes store for video delivery.

I doubt it. I strongly doubt it, although I wouldn’t be shocked to find out that Apple had prototyped such a thing; big IT companies go through lots of prototypes during research and development. The reason why I’m doubtful is that while it sounds good in theory (Apple has a content ecosystem in place, it does good industrial design and as yet nobody’s really “cracked” a good Smart TV), it ignores one of the factors that’s made Apple a whole lot of money in recent years — namely that it likes repeat business. People drop iPhones and iPads all over the place, and new features prompt some buyers to replace every year. Who replaces their TV every year? Almost nobody. A TV is a long-term prospect, and as such Apple would need lots of content to make its model of TV compelling. The existing Apple TV set top box already provides a gateway to its iTunes ecosystem for selling and renting content; I’d be less shocked to see, a say, LG-presents-TV-with-integrated-Apple-TV than a genuine Apple TV.

Next on the reading of the livers of unfortunate animals (and next in the alphabet) would be Google. Google’s likely to continue chipping away at many markets, essentially doing what Microsoft’s done for years; subsidising some products via the massive profits made from just a few. In Google’s case that’s largely search advertising, and it’s funded all sorts of acquisitions (some of which Google shuttered during 2011) and startup projects, most prominently Android-based smartphones and tablets. I suspect 2012 is the year we’ll see a “Google” Android tablet. Previously this could have been one built by another company — in the same way that Google’s own Android phones have been HTC and Samsung models respectively — but with Google having gobbled up Motorola in 2011, it could be an entirely in-house effort. Google’s own moves in the netbook space with its Chromebooks seems to have stalled for the moment, as has Google’ own TV ambitions; I’d be surprised if either made significant headway in Australia, if they ever make it here at all.

Last in my prognosticating list is Microsoft. While it’s not definite, it’s highly likely we’ll see Windows 8 emerge sometime in 2012, although I wouldn’t put a pin anywhere in the calendar before June if I were you. Windows 8 is clearly part of Microsoft’s strategy to more closely align all of its consumer IT properties, from smartphones to consoles to computers under one well understood interface, and it’ll be fascinating to see how well (and how quickly) Microsoft manages this. Its coffers are immense (as are its spending habits when it comes to both R&D and marketing) and it’s got an easy head start in terms of Windows existing place in the market; while big businesses will no doubt take a slow approach to the new operating system and everything it may offer, the push for individual users to bring their own devices (and increasingly laptops) into work may make Windows 8 a very rapidly adopted operating system indeed.

Samsung’s Tablet Clears Its Court Woes

Tablets have been one of the biggest technology issues of 2011, so it’s perhaps fitting that as the year winds to a close, one of the largest and most acrimonious legal battles surrounding tablets has come to a conclusion. Earlier in the year, Apple had sought to block Samsung from selling the Galaxy Tab 10.1, a Tablet running the Android 3.0 (“Honeycomb”) operating system. Not because there was anything wrong with Honeycomb, but because Apple felt it infringed on its iPad and specifically some patents relating to it. I’m no lawyer and hardly qualified to comment on the legal proceedings that took place, except to say that they were lengthy, no doubt expensive, and seemed to see-saw back and forth with each given week. At long last, after appeals, Samsung’s been granted the rights to sell the tablet in Australia; it will do so directly through retailers with a 16GB Galaxy Tab 10.1 costing $579 outright or $729 if you want the 3G-enabled version of the tablet. Telcos have also announced plans to sell the 10.1 on contract, although at the time of writing only Vodafone had announced exact pricing; that may well change by the time you read this.

For the truly technology keen, the 10.1’s been available through grey market importers for some time, so it’s not exactly a new product to our shores in one sense. I’ve not had the chance to test out an “official” Galaxy Tab 10.1 through Samsung directly as yet, but I have had some hands on time with a directly imported unit. It’s certainly a nicely designed tablet; I can see why it could have irked Apple as the feel is terribly iPad-esque, but having said that I’d better clarify again; I’m not a lawyer and even with that caveat I’m not entirely comfortable with the idea that this should be enough to have any product banned per se.

Getting them onto retail shelves will be the interesting next step, especially depending on how keen consumers end up being to actually buy them. There’s no shortage of competing tablets; even ignoring Apple you could buy a tablet from vendors such as Acer or Asus already, and whether the Tab 10.1 will grab attention will be interesting to see. I’m writing this at the moment rather remotely from the UK, where the Tab 10.1 has been available for many months, and anecdotally from what I can see — and especially what I can see busy technology shoppers actually stopping to test — the Tab 10.1 is seen as “just another tablet”. Given how long and hard Samsung Australia’s fought to have it appear on Australian shelves, I’m betting that’s not the response they’re hoping for from Aussie consumers. It’s worth noting that the Tab 10.1, like much of the rest of this year’s Android tablet crop, is an Android 3 product; the latest Android iteration, Android 4.0 (“Ice Cream Sandwich”, if you want its official product name) is currently only officially available on one phone, although ironically that’s a Samsung product; a phone produced for Google called the Google Galaxy Nexus. Ice Cream Sandwich is meant to bridge the divide between phones and tablets and is expected to be available on a wide variety of tablets, but it’s not yet confirmed at all if it’ll come to the Tab 10.1 or not.

Google’s Chromebooks: Shiny, Or About As Useful As Tailfins?

Is there space for yet another operating system in the marketplace besides Windows, Mac OS X and the many flavours of Linux? Google certainly thinks so, and over the next six months we’ll see a number of laptops launch running Google’s own “Chrome OS”. This shouldn’t be confused with Google’s cross-platform browser, also called Chrome. Chrome OS is actually an offshoot of Linux, so much so that there’s an open source derivative version, Chromium that can be downloaded and run on pretty much any hardware you throw at it. Google’s own officially-branded notebooks running the Chrome operating system will have specific hardware requirements and be known as Chromebooks.

Chromebooks will differ from the regular laptop in a way that’s not all that surprising given Google’s focus on online applications. They’re primarily cloud-based, which means the majority of data a Chromebook will access will be stored online, with minimum quantities of onboard storage. As shouldn’t be a shock, Google’s own applications are front and centre, with the key experience intended to be similar to that of running everything in a browser, all of the time. Online access also means that onboard processing power will be kept low, although this cutting down of storage and processors hasn’t led to price drops for the first run of Chromebooks, expected to launch overseas mid-June. They’re priced at the same kinds of prices you’d pay for a netbook running Windows right now. To remain competitive, they’re probably going to have to drop prices a touch, especially in Australia where online data costs could quickly make a Chromebook a rather costly option.

While the big name vendors such as Samsung and Acer will start selling Chromebooks overseas very soon now, there’s actually a locally produced laptop available right now running Chrome… of a sort. Local online retailer Kogan announced the “world’s first” laptop powered by Google’s “Chromium” operating system back on the 3rd of June. The choice of words in describing it is undeniably rather deliberate; Kogan’s effort isn’t a Google-stamped Chromebook, but running on the open source Chromium variant instead. That could have implications down the track for updates and security, as part of Google’s pitch for Chromebooks is that they’ll update automatically (based on a common hardware profile) while the open source Chromium variant is dependant on open source developers continuing to improve the code, which they may or may not do. I’ve not yet had a chance to slap one of Kogan’s Chromium-based laptops onto my test bench to assess if it’s any good or not, however.

This still leaves the question quite open as to whether ChromeOS will actually capture the attention of consumer buyers. There’s been a definite shift in recent years towards cloud-based applications. Google’s the obvious poster child, but even Apple’s getting into the game with the launch of its iCloud service. Lightweight inexpensive netbooks have enjoyed reasonable sales, but they’re also being pinched by easy to use Tablets, including those running Google’s own Android operating system. Despite appearances, not everything Google releases automatically turns to gold. Its Wave online real-time collaboration product was launched with considerable hype, but failed to gain the attention of the broader market; Google’s essentially ditched Wave, as it has other products that haven’t taken the way the company intended to.

Is Touch Going To Be Enough?

For a very long time, there have been pushes to move computing beyond the confines of the keyboard. The mouse as a computing device actually dates from 1963, but it was the mid 1980s before mice in computing became particularly widespread. In recent years, even the mouse has been updated, improved and worked upon, whether it was the switch from mechanical, ball-based mice to laser-guided devices, or the move from cabled to wireless mice, or even the more oddball mice concepts out there, such as Air Mice that double as 3D pointers.

Mice themselves might become a technological oddity as (if you’ll pardon the rather obvious pun) touch really does take hold. Tablet PCs are the obvious place where touch is most prominent, but it’s not the only “digital” platform; a number of vendors offer PCs and notebooks with inbuilt touch capability, thanks to the fact that Windows 7 natively supports touch based input. To date, I’ve not been thrilled by touch on Windows 7, largely because while it works, there aren’t that many applications that make as much sense within the way that Windows 7 applications are written to use touch rather than a mouse and keyboard. That doesn’t mean a new application can’t use touch sensibly, but at this stage it’s a nice thing for Windows 7 rather than a key feature.

Operating systems that use touch as the basis for everything and are written that way, such as Google’s Android and Apple’s iOS fare better in this regard, because software developers think of them in those kinds of terms.

Touch still relies on physical contact, and one of the other reasons why I’ve yet to be really wowed by a touch-capable notebook is the physical effort involved in reaching over to the screen. Not that this is an onerous task per se, but simply because on a regular notebook, you’re still reaching right past a perfectly usable keyboard and trackpad to press an onscreen button that could be clicked on instead. It doesn’t make a whole lot of sense to me. Even that effort might rather rapidly become something rather quaint, however, and via a rather unusual agency: Console gaming. Specifically, Microsoft’s Kinect, an add-on camera for the Xbox 360 console. The Kinect is intended (at this stage) for games, as it allows a gamer to wriggle, jump, box, or do whatever the game commands, and see those movements mapped onto an in-game character. That’s the theory, but it took very little time at all for intrepid hacking types to grab hold of the USB-connected Kinect camera and use its body-mapping technology for all sorts of other purposes on a PC. Interestingly, Microsoft hasn’t jumped on the lawyer-heavy bandwagon to stop this kind of thing, and some press interviews suggest that a Windows version of Kinect might not be that far away. Suddenly, all those cool sci-fi images of people working on virtual floating computer displays that don’t exist at all are very close indeed.

Augmented Reality Makes Reality Easier To Understand

There’s a phrase used in software all to describe a utility that’s so essential, so brilliant, that it simply sells the hardware around it: The Killer Application.

Not as deadly as they sound, it should be pointed out. Windows, in its time, was a killer app. So was the original Netscape browser, so (arguably) was id Software’s Doom. Killer Applications don’t even have to be applications that launch a new idea as much as they refine an existing one, and if you want proof of that, look at Google. When Google launched, there were a plethora of general purpose search engines on offer. These days, if Microsoft wasn’t pouring buckets of money into Bing, there’d only be Google.

One of the big buzzwords that has been labelled as a killer application in recent years has been the concept of Augmented Reality. This is taking a device with an inbuilt camera (typically a smartphone) and often location awareness (usually GPS), and matching the two to enable the screen on the smartphone to display additional information about the location around you. To date, it’s largely been used simple games and for navigation-style applications, such as pointing out where nearby restaurants are, or for interacting with Wikipedia entries for local points of interest. Reasonable stuff, although the number of people actually willing to wander around unfamiliar environments holding an expensive smartphone up to their faces is, not surprisingly, rather low.

I’ve recently been testing out something that could well be the next great killer augmented reality application, even though it’s on a platform that’s very well established: The iPhone. As with all things iPhone, it’s an app, and in this case, it’s a translation application called Word Lens. And as with most killer applications, it’s not really in what it’s doing — which is essentially just crude machine-based single word translation — but in how it melds existing technologies with new ones to achieve its purpose.

The use of software to aid in language translation goes back decades, but until relatively recently it was largely limited in use to those in fixed positions. What Word Lens does is use the iPhone’s camera to capture text, then translate it on the fly and superimpose it over the onscreen display. The end results can be a little shaky depending on how well you’re focusing the camera and whether the font used on the text is easily readable or not, but for basic translations, as long as you’re aware of the essential context of what you’re looking at, it’s surprisingly good. For those with a sense of the impish, it’ll also reverse words or blank them out altogether in the free demo version. For now, it’ll only support English to Spanish or Spanish To English, but apparently other languages are in the works.

Word Lens isn’t the only augmented reality application with utility at its core on the market, even though it’s one with immediate impact for any traveller, especially as it works without an active data connection. Google’s been slowly improving its Google Goggles application (available for Android and iPhone), which uses the same kind of image recognition for immediate searching as well as simple translation via optical character recognition, although its text-handling capabilities are nowhere near as good as that offered by Word Lens.

Where Augmented Reality applications like Word Lens or Google Goggles get it right is by reducing the need to interface with the application down to a few seconds, rather than a constant connection. You’re much more likely to pull out a phone and take a quick snapshot than you are wander around with your phone on prominent display. Equally, by providing a genuinely useful service, such as translation or the display of a quick search to help you understand something, they’ve got the real ability to provide genuine value.