Children reading a book, already a thing of the past?

Contrary to Michael Stern Hart’s vision of e-books being able to give young readers almost limitless access to books and information, has the e-book sounded the death knell to a golden period of reading amongst the young?

We all remember those days in our youth when we visited a grandparent or other relative, and perused their bookshelves; a library it had taken them a lifetime to attain. In my case, I often broke the cardinal rule of not judging a book by its cover, habitually choosing a book that looked scary from its cover picture, especially one involving werewolves or ghosts. I’d then read my new find at home under the bedclothes, by torchlight.

No E-Book Libraries

Sadly, it won’t be possible to do the same in the future with an e-book library. E-book libraries are tied to the device and the account of the device owner. It is not possible, and it is unlikely to ever be if the publishers have their way, to share the books you’ve purchased, with another person. The youngsters of the future won’t be able to borrow a book from their grandparents library, without borrowing the physical device itself, and thus depriving the poor grandparent of their entire library.

“Access to eBooks can thus provide opportunity for increased literacy. Literacy, and the ideas contained in literature, creates opportunity.”

This opportunity looks lost on the younger generation, who not only cannot afford an expensive device like an e-reader, but also cannot afford to build up their own library. Of course, the next generation of children could simply borrow e-books from the library rather than purchase them, as other generations have done with paper copies, except that could get expensive.

I am not sure about other areas, but in my county, the libraries charge £1 per e-book for three weeks. Furthermore, this is the same price, regardless of the age and size of the book. Therefore even free and out of copyright classics, such as Treasure Island, cost a £1 a time. Even though they can be downloaded for free from Project Gutenberg by anyone, and kept forever – for free! So in essence, the libraries are even charging for free books, and they cannot blame that on the publishers. Sure it isn’t expensive, but £1 a time isn’t free either, and one has to wonder, would I have borrowed so many books from the library when I was young, had I had to pay for them? I doubt it.

A library of half empty shelves, something that will become more and more common.

These days, when children have so many other things to spend their money on, will they spend their money on books? Of course children of the next generation could just use their local libraries for paperbacks and hardbacks for free, as we all can at the moment. But this is assuming that libraries will still exist in this form in the future. After all, why have dozens of large, manned buildings with all the associated costs, when the same service can be offered online via a simple website and e-books? How many physical libraries will exist for the next generation?

We are already seeing large cut backs in local libraries, they seem to hold fewer and fewer books these days, instead transporting them in to your local library (for a small fee) when you ask for them. Local councils probably see e-books as a god send, a way of dramatically cutting costs and overheads. Unfortunately, the publishers see them in the opposite way, and a way of dramatically increasing profits.

Many publishers are withholding their books from libraries as e-books meaning that most library e-book selections are somewhat lacking. Those that are allowing them, are making it extremely difficult for the libraries and their customers. The publishing industry still appears to view e-books in the same way as paper books. Libraries are only allowed to lend one copy of an e-book out at a time, even though this is senseless waste of resources and is needlessly stifling access to literature. Moreover, as e-books do not degrade, publishers have imposed a 26 lend limit, i.e. if an e-book is leant out 26 times, it expires, and another copy must be purchased from the publisher. This equates to e-books only lasting about one year, whereas paper books can often last a decade or more. Hardly good value for money for cash strapped libraries.

Rather than create the unlimited access to literature that Michael Hart wanted, has his invention done the opposite and made literature a luxury that children can no longer afford?

“One thing about eBooks that most people haven’t thought much is that eBooks are the very first thing that we’re all able to have as much as we want other than air.”
Michael Stern Hart

E-Book Piracy

What of the future then? If physical libraries and books are virtually none existent and e-book selections by local libraries are practically devoid of any decent titles, or over stuffed with various license agreements and restrictions, not to mention expensive, where will the youth of tomorrow get their books? Of course there is a simple and easy way for the technologically advanced youth of tomorrow to get access to millions of books, and all for free – piracy.

The publishing industry has already begun to complain about piracy being a problem, and yet is falling into the same pitfalls as the music and film industry with its pricing structure and content restrictions.

Most e-books, at least those from the major publishers, contain DRM and require activation and additional downloading of software to read your book. DRM is designed to prevent piracy, the music industry dabbled with it in the early days, before noting its unpopularity and realising it was pointless and useless. DRM just doesn’t work, it is easily circumvented by those who wish to and just ends up as an inconvenience to the honest law abiding citizen.

The film and video game industry still use DRM, however they have an advantage over the publishing industry, films, especially high definition ones, and video games tend to be very large in terms of file sizes and would take a while for a would-be pirate to download. Not so with books; e-books are tiny. Hundreds of thousands of e-books can fit on DVDs. Huge e-book collections are sold on places like eBay in their droves.

Now those e-books may very well be legitimate legal copies, but bearing in mind that it has taken 40 years for Project Gutenberg to amass its collection of 36,000 books, it seems a little unlikely that those collections of 200,000+ e-books are all free, public domain and bona fide.

Clearly piracy is a problem, but who is to blame? The consumer?

On the eBay link above, the average price of the collections of 1000s of e-books was about £3.99. Just 1000 books, reading one book a week, would give the consumer almost two decades of reading material.

Compare that to John Steinbeck’s Of Mice and Men; this classic book was first published in 1937 and is priced at £4.49 on Amazon (and everywhere else – for reasons I shall come to). The lendable, resellable, unrescindable paperback copy is just 20 pence more expensive.

Consumers therefore have a stark choice, buy the paperback to get more for their money; if they have already purchased an e-reader they have the choice of buying over priced e-books or paying virtually nothing for thousands upon thousands of pirate copies. You can understand why many choose piracy after all consumers not only gravitate towards what is cheaper, but also what is easier.

This price of e-books is of course compounded by the way that those prices are set. In 1900 an agreement was made between publishers and book sellers, and the Net Book Agreement came into being. This agreement meant that the publishers could set the price that a book was sold to the public. Meaning that for almost 100 years, no matter which book shop you went into, the same book, would always be the same price – everywhere. In 1997 the Restrictive Practices Court ruled that the Net Book Agreement was against the public interest and therefore illegal. Publishers were no longer able to price fix their books.

That was, until the e-book came along, and then the Net Book Agreement was reborn under the guise of the ‘agency pricing’ model in which the publishers once again fix the price of their products across all stores, i.e. no special offers, no give-aways and no difference in pricing. Amazon notes this by stating clearly under the book ‘This price was set by the publisher’.

Not all publishers set their prices this way, just the major ones.

It seems that a lack of competition in the e-book market, added to unjustifiable pricing and restrictions are what are driving consumers towards piracy, and as always the biggest loser will always be the content creators and their fans.

Authors, most of whom struggle to make a living from writing anyway (aside from the likes of J.K. Rowling and Stephanie Meyer), will find it harder and harder to make money from writing and perhaps decide that they can no longer afford to write the books that you so enjoy.

The irony is that the publishing industry seems to be using their greatest asset, the e-book, as a stick to beat their customers with. Not realising that by doing so not only will they lose business, but in the long run and in their attempt to squeeze as much profit from everyone at every stage possible with e-books, they are in reality committing seppuku and killing their product at its roots.

Without ready access to literature, the next generation of people who actually give the publishers any worth, the authors, will be stifled, perhaps even snubbed out totally.

In the future there is likely to be many more authors writing for niche markets of far fewer readers, rather than the current model of very few authors writing for the masses, leaving little or no room for the publishers.

Can e-readers and e-books really replace the good old book?

E-books are now out-selling paper books, at least according to Amazon, and are tipped as the must have gadget of the impending festive season. Is this truly The Age of the E-Book, or are consumers being short-changed by a sub-standard product, actually worth far less than their predecessors?

In this, the first of a series of posts on e-books and the future, we look at the beginnings of the e-book, and what the era of e-books may mean for consumers.

What is an E-Book

On Tuesday 6th September of this year, Michael Stern Hart, sadly passed away. Michael Hart is perhaps not a household name, but his invention is sure to be – the electronic book or e-book.

“He had been granted access to significant computing power at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. On July 4 1971, after being inspired by a free printed copy of the U.S. Declaration of Independence, he decided to type the text into a computer, and to transmit it to other users on the computer network. From this beginning, the digitization and distribution of literature was to be Hart’s life’s work, spanning over 40 years.”
Obituary for Michael Stern Hart – Project Gutenberg

Although he typed out most of the early books himself, volunteers and contributors have allowed the Project Gutenberg library to reach 36,000 books. If you have never visited Project Gutenberg, it is well worth a look, as there are thousands of literary classics available for a range of devices (Kindle, Android, iPad and many others), and all for free.

Although e-books themselves have been around for a while, there has never really been a comfortable way of reading, up until recently with the advent of better screens and e-ink technology. This has allowed people to read on tablet computers like the iPad and e-readers like the Sony Reader and the Kindle, as if they were paper books.

“The invention of eBooks was not simply a technological innovation or precursor to the modern information environment. A more correct understanding is that eBooks are an efficient and effective way of unlimited free distribution of literature.”

However far from being the free, or virtually costless way of mass distributing literature, the burgeoning e-book market has been beset by problems and complaints.

E-Books erode consumer rights

Currently, if you were to purchase a paperback or a hardback, read it and decide to lend it to a friend or give it to a charity shop, you can. This isn’t possible with e-books, they are strictly tied to a device and an account. Despite costing virtually the same as paperback books, e-books have no re-sale value, effectively costing more as there is no way to recoup money spent on e-books that you no longer need.

The reason that you cannot sell them is quite simple – you don’t actually own them. Buying an e-book means you purchase the right to read it, effectively renting it, nothing more. Moreover, this is a right that can be revoked at any point as was proven by Amazon when they took back books from their own customers in the past.

“It illustrates how few rights you have when you buy an e-book from Amazon,” said Bruce Schneier, chief security technology officer for British Telecom and an expert on computer security and commerce. “As a Kindle owner, I’m frustrated. I can’t lend people books and I can’t sell books that I’ve already read, and now it turns out that I can’t even count on still having my books tomorrow.”

Should the company that you purchased your e-book from happen to go bust, or be bought out, it is entirely possible that they may take your entire library with them.

More annoyingly, if you read a book you think your partner may wish to read, you’d have to lend her your e-reader to read the book, or she’d have to purchase the book herself, or you’d have to keep swapping e-readers. If you and your partner had similar taste in books you’d both have to buy each book individually and end up with two libraries that were almost identical. Which I am sure the publishing industry won’t mind.

Another complaint about e-books has been their price. Despite having virtually nil production costs per digital copy, as they don’t need specific print runs, transportation, storage etc, and the fact that e-books have more limitations and restrictions than paper versions, e-books still cost virtually the same as paper copies. This means that unless the first 100 or so books that you read are free classics, courtesy of Project Gutenberg, it is virtually impossible to recoup the initial outlay you made in buying a device to read the e-books on.

This had lead to many criticisms that consumers are being duped into paying the same amount for something that is intrinsically worth less than a paper copy.

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This week marked the end of an era in the technology world, as Steve Jobs, who along with Steve Wozniack founded Apple, stepped down as CEO of Apple. The man who brought the world the iPod, the iPhone and the iPad, will no longer head Apple.

Apple Computer

Despite Jobs being the man most associated with Apple today, it was co-founder Steve Wozniak who created the first Apple Computer, from the design, and parts to the operating system, and also the second one, the Apple II. However it was Jobs that was the driving force behind the company.

It was Jobs who first saw the potential of the home computers, and Jobs who garnered ‘Apple’ their first order, and it was Jobs’ drive and enthusiasm that made Apple Computer into the company it soon became. It was also Jobs’ passion that allowed Apple Computer to lure PepsiCo President John Sculley away from PepsiCo to be their new CEO in 1983. An act that perhaps Steve Jobs came to regret.

Apple Jobs-less

In 1985, after a power struggle with John Sculley, Steve Jobs was forced out of Apple by the board. Something that perhaps the Apple Computer board, soon came to regret.

After Jobs’ forced resignation, Apple Computer floundered, the IBM clone PCs took off, whereas Apple’s line of home computers did not, despite technical advances such as mice, icons and the first computer GUI (graphical user interface – i.e. desktop).

Steve Jobs however, prospered away from Apple, setting up NeXT Computer and bringing the world another advanced home computer, but this also didn’t take off. It was in software that NeXT and Jobs were most successful. Apple eventually purchased NeXT in 1996 for $429 million gaining back Steve Jobs and also the NeXT Step operating system, which was used as the basis for Mac OS.

In 1997 Gil Amelio, like John Sculley three years earlier (and of course Jobs himself) was forced out by the Apple board, Jobs was soon named CEO.

Apple and Microsoft

Steve Jobs wasn’t long at the helm of Apple before he managed to get a partnership, and an investment from long term rival, Microsoft. Jobs said at the time:

“So, the era of setting this up as a competition between Apple and Microsoft is over as far as I’m concerned. This is about getting Apple healthy, this is about Apple being able to make incredibly great contributions to the industry and to get healthy and prosper again.”

Jobs then steered Apple toward creating more aesthetically pleasing and better designed products, introducing the iMac and the iBook.

These ground breaking products were followed by the iPod, iTunes, the iPhone and most recently, the iPad, turning Apple products from niche products to much sought after products.

Jobs is credited with almost single-handedly turning things around for Apple, turning decline into a great success and ironically overtaking Microsoft as the world’s largest technology company.

However Jobs has now stepped down, and is in very poor health, perhaps even terminally ill if the rumours are to be believed. So what now for Apple?

Ive and Cook

The new Apple CEO is Tim Cook, and while he certainly doesn’t have the track record of Jobs, he is seen as a capable replacement.

As I said, Jobs is given almost all the credit for Apple’s recent success, but there is another man at Apple who can at least take some of the credit, Jonathan Ive. Ive is the designer behind every Apple product since the iMac, acknowledged as the man that made Apple’s products so desirable. So it is certainly possible that Ive and Cook together can continue the success that Apple is currently experiencing.

However, neither man has the vision and drive of Jobs. Jobs was able to sell Apple versions of devices that were either already available, and in some cases superior to Apple’s offering, as well as updated versions of failed products, such as the tablet. The tablet in particular was a device that Microsoft had previously tried, and failed, to launch into the mainstream, and even Apple had failed before. Yet Jobs managed to make it a must have item.

Jobs is staying on as Chairman, but clearly as ill as he is, this is unlikely to be a hands on role, or indeed, for long.

Will Apple with Tim Cook at the helm continue to make such trend setting products? Or will Apple once again slide back into being purely a niche product maker?

Only time will tell.

Ironically, most people would probably associate Microsoft with the PC more than IBM, in part due to the fact that the market was soon flooded with IBM PC clones and IBM soon became merely one of many manufacturers, but also because Microsoft Operating System was what the end user saw each time he turned his PC on.

Microsoft was there on the cusp of home computing and has dominated for all three of those decades, being the chosen OS on 90% of home computers.

The PC is Dead, Long Live the Tablet

Now, one of those involved in creating the PC, IBM’s Mark Dean has said that the era of the PC is over.

I, personally, have moved beyond the PC as well. My primary computer now is a tablet. When I helped design the PC, I didn’t think I’d live long enough to witness its decline. But, while PCs will continue to be much-used devices, they’re no longer at the leading edge of computing. They’re going the way of the vacuum tube, typewriter, vinyl records, CRT and incandescent light bulbs.

It’s funny, I was watching a film from the 90s recently and saw someone using a typewriter and laughed at how incongruous it looked, a device that I had pretty much forgotten had even existed in the recent past. Will we soon be thinking the same about the humble personal computer? Laughing at how we struggled to use such primitive and inflexible devices?

According to IBM and Steve Jobs we will.

Microsoft, who led the way through the late 80s and early 90s, famously missed the internet and since then have consistently misread or been behind the curve. They’ve gone from a trend setter to a hapless follower of fashion in the last two decades, with Apple now seen as the primary innovator of home computing, particularly since the introduction of the iPad. Microsoft with no real touchscreen OS, have again been caught lagging when the next ‘Big Thing’ has come along.

However it is not the first time that we have seen these types of tablet devices billed as the next big thing. In 2001 they were called Tablet PCs and ran a stripped down version of Windows XP, and it was Bill Gates touting them as miracle machines. However back then touch screens were not good enough to be used effectively so Tablet PCs were really ‘pen enabled PCs’, at least according to Microsoft.

They never really caught on, although the industry refused to kill them off completely.

Next came Project Origami in 2006, otherwise known as the Ultra Mobile PC. The ridiculously expensive and underpowered devices oddly didn’t catch on but did demonstrate that Microsoft and the hardware manufacturer’s just weren’t accurately predicting what the consumer wanted. UMPCs are technically still going but the format is in reality, dead.

A little over a year later, it was once again demonstrated to the ‘industry’ that it was the consumer, and not they, who dictated the trends with the launch of the netbook. Netbooks became a massive, and to many, a surprise hit and almost single handedly kept computer sales going during the economic slump. Consumers couldn’t get enough of the small, low powered and cheap mini-laptops, which, aside from their size, were almost the complete opposite of UMPCs.

Tablet PC Vs Netbook

Microsoft’s gamble was on UMPCs meant that they almost completely missed netbooks. Most of the early netbooks ran Linux, a free operating system, in part to keep costs down, but also because netbooks, being low powered, were unable to run Microsoft’s latest OS, Windows Vista.

Eventually Microsoft caught on, and resurrected the aged Windows XP for netbooks, before shipping the new Windows 7 Starter Edition on netbooks, virtually forcing Linux out of the market.

Microsoft also belatedly caught on with the new style of Tablets, i.e. ones without the use of a stylus. Unfortunately, even Windows 7 wasn’t really designed as a touch screen interface and so Microsoft has been without a true Tablet OS throughout the current rise of the tablet, lagging behind the likes of Google and Apple.

The major player in the tablet market is now Apple, who overtook Microsoft as the world’s largest technology company last year, helped in no small part by its iPod, iPhones and iPads. For Apple, the future is in tablets, where they look set to dominate.

Google however, has its own idea of where the future of computing lies, and gambled on it lying in the recently launched Chrome OS, the operating system that runs in the Cloud. Chrome OS ships on Chromebooks), which are fairly standard netbooks with internet access and all the applications are run online and document storage is also online. This means that not only does the Chromebook not have to be powerful, but also that the user doesn’t need to purchase or install any software, or worry about things like viruses.

Perhaps a little optimistic, as both Apple and Linux has met this criteria for years and yet had little market penetration.

The magic word here seems to be ‘the Cloud’, which sounds great, but in reality means that all your information will be stored, probably permanently, on Google’s servers. The only application that runs on a Chromebook is the browser, Google Chrome, meaning that if you have your preferred software, you’ll have to find a Google browser based alternative.

The Future?

IBM, despite building the first PC, are no longer in the PC making business, they apparently saw that the business had little future, selling that side of the business to Chinese firm Lenovo in 2005. According to Mark Dean et al, we are now in the post-pc era.

Personally, and to paraphrase Mark Twain, I think reports of the PC’s demise have been greatly exaggerated.

Many claimed that radio, and then television, and then video, CDs, DVDs and the internet as well as e-readers would be the end of the book. But no. Book sales have risen despite these inventions.

We are not living the post-PC era, the so called replacements for the PC are merely ancillary devices. Mark Dean said that he has replaced his PC with a tablet computer, I find it hard to believe that this is as total as he implies unless he no longer needs to write emails, or any kind of document. Typing on a tablet is similar to typing on a smartphone, fine for short texts and Twitter, but you wouldn’t really want to be writing lots of emails on it, or anything else. Not to mention the fact that you can’t really print from a tablet, does Mark Dean no longer need to print anything?

Then there is the software, you can’t just install software on tablets, you’d have to get Apps from its App Store and if there isn’t anything that meets your requirements, you’ll need to use a PC.

Also, an often overlooked drawback to tablets, is that they are less efficient, not only is typing slower for most people, but also navigating the OS. With a mouse you can simply select an item, or search for it, using a tablet usually involves a fair amount of scrolling, and moving through screens.

As for Chrome OS, it is a similar story. As long as you’re connected to Google’s servers and only want to use the limited software on offer, it may be of use. However if you stay in a hotel, or anywhere else, that has no Wifi, or other internet access, then the device is useless save to lean on to make notes on paper.

Indeed, unlike a tablet computer, which does have its uses, it is difficult to see the attraction in basically doing all your computing, and storing all of your data, on someone else’s computer. There is nothing that can be done on ChromeOS that cannot be done on any netbook with a browser already, and Chromebooks are more expensive that netbooks, yet are impeded by design to prevent user from getting the best out of the device.

No, we are not living in a post PC era, far from it, we are in fact discovering new ways to use our PCs and new ways of accessing information and data we create on them.

I suspect that Mark Dean still has a PC in his office, and his home, as he says himself, the tablet is primary computer, not his only computer. He may well use his tablet most of the time as he will likely carry it around with him, but I am sure that when it comes to doing anything substantial or productive, the PC is his primary choice.

As it will be for all of us for quite some time to come.

Web developers have been saying for years that only idiots use Internet Explorer, and it seems that they may actually have been correct all along.

BBC News – Internet Explorer users have lower IQ says study

Internet Explorer users have a lower than average IQ, according to research by Consulting firm AptiQuant.

According to the study, those with the lowest IQ use Internet Explorer 6 as their browser, but also that IE users have a lower IQ on average than users of other browsers. But is this really all that surprising?

Long in the Tooth

IE6 is now over ten years old, seriously old in software terms, and well past its use-by date, it is insecure and incompatible with new technologies and techniques. Even Microsoft advise users to ditch it and upgrade as soon as possible.

Even worse however, is the fact that IE6 was never a good browser in the first place, which is why it received so much ire from web developers. IE6, and even later versions of Internet Explorer, don’t follow web standards which mean after developers had created a website, they then had to spend many more hours ensuring it was functional in Internet Explorer 6.

Moreoever, many clients, even now, still ask for IE6 compatible websites, much to the continuing annoyance of web developers and despite the fact that many online services do not support IE6, as IE6 is not HTML5 or CSS3 compatible.

Smart people once used IE too

The rest if the Internet Explorer family isn’t much better. A lack of competition in the browser market in the last decade resulted in a lack of innovation, new browsers eventually came along with pioneering new features and Microsoft has been playing catch-up ever since. Which may explain why the average IE user has an IQ of quite a bit less than average, the smart people have gone with the innovative and up-to-date browsers, like Opera whose users have an average IQ of over 120. There was one section of IE users that also scored over 120 for IQ, those using IE with the Chrome frame Addon.

What is even more interesting about this study however, is that it was also conducted but never released, in 2006. Five years ago, it was Internet Explorer users that had the highest average IQ, and Opera users who had the lowest. So quite a turnaround in five years, perhaps in another five years, the smart people will once again be using Internet Explorer?

Update

Well it turns out that the whole thing was a fake story, picked up by most of the major news organisations. There never was a study, and the whole thing was faked.

But as many of the other points still stand, we are leaving this post here.

Trust Issues

A decade or more ago, the news that phone handset or software makers were tracking and storing the user’s location, without their explicit knowledge or consent, would have raised a storm of protest. As it is today, few other than technology writers, have so much as batted an eyelid.

Back in 2004, the then Information Commissioner, Richard Thomas warned:

“My anxiety is that we don’t sleepwalk into a surveillance society where much more information is collected about people, accessible to far more people shared across many more boundaries, than British society would feel comfortable with.”

Seven years ago his warnings were seen as alarmist, today it could be argued that they were extremely prescient and perhaps even inadequate.

BBC News – Researchers say iPhones can track users’ movements

Apple iPhones and 3G iPads are secretly recording and storing details of all their owners’ movements, researchers claim.

The fact that the iPhone and iPad have been doing this since they were released is troubling, but the fact that Apple hasn’t seen the need to explain or justify its reasoning for storing this data, and storing it unencrypted – but hidden from the user, is deeply disturbing.

Of course you could argue that the information is innocuous and of no real use, you’d be wrong. Apart from the obvious interest to law enforcement officials, there are wider and darker implications to this information. It shows where the user goes, and when. Very useful information for suspicious spouses, bosses, and stalkers and a veritable goldmine for behavioural advertisers. However I am sure that this has nothing to do with Apple patenting an Advertisement in the Operating System, back in late 2009.

This patent by Apple was for a system whereby an advert would be displayed and the advert would lock the operating system of the device until the user acknowledged the advert by clicking on it. Very handy, if say it was sent to you at 8.47am every morning, the same time you walk past Starbucks on your way to work every day, and renders your phone inoperable until you click on it.

Android Gives Up Users Too

Those using Android handsets thanking their lucky stars that they plumped for Android instead of Apple, aren’t much better off. Android handsets do the same thing, albeit with a limit to how much data it stores, but unlike Apple’s iPhone, the Android handsets appear to send this information to Google, with a unique identifier.

Android handsets also do something else a little creepy too, if you have an Android handset, then it most likely has been storing your internet routers exact location, and sending it back to Google, for Google to share with the world. This is so Google knows exactly where you are when you use its websites and services:

Google location tracking can invade privacy, hackers say • The Register

When phones running the Google OS detect any wireless network, they beam its MAC address, signal strength and GPS coordinates to Google servers, along with the unique ID of the handset.

If you have wireless internet, and know how to view or get your MAC address for your router, you may want to enter it into this website to see if Google is aware of it, and sharing it. You may think that this is little different from your IP address that you share with every website you visit anyway, but again, you’d be wrong. Your IP address generally only gives the location of the servers that you use to get onto the internet, i.e. Virgin Media’s servers, BT’s, Talk Talk’s etc, very rarely anywhere near your actual location. The information sent back to Google by your Android phone, is pretty much your exact address, moreover IP addresses change, MAC addresses do not, not without a new router.  All very useful for behavioural advertising, and Google is the world’s largest ad vendor.

It is possible to opt out of this, but the location page that allows you to do this does not make it clear exactly what is being stored, nor what Google will do with the supposedly anonymous information.

So should we just accept these increasingly intrusive business practices as part of living in the 21st Century? Or should we be drawing a line in the sand and saying, ‘Enough’?

Sorry! The Cloud Isn’t Working Today

Some big name websites such as Foursquare, Reddit and Quora were taken offline this week by a major outage, not the first to hit Cloud Computing, and certainly not the last.

BBC News – Amazon fault takes down websites

Scores of well-known websites have been unavailable for large parts of Thursday because of problems with Amazon’s web hosting service.

As a website hosting company, we know the damage that can be done by a major outage, both to customer websites and reputations, and to our own. Amazon will surely be smarting from this, as demonstrated by their reticence about it, and confidence in the Cloud will be knocked again. Some companies were complaining that this is just the latest in a string of problems at Amazon’s East Coast Cloud Facility.

With companies like Microsoft, Google and Amazon pushing us all to store everything we possibly can in the Cloud, perhaps it is time to take a step back and look at what Cloud Computing really is, and whether or not we should trust ‘it’ with all our information, and also our business

The Cloud

The Cloud, is just someone else’s computer (or server) so when you are storing your photos, documents etc in the Cloud, you are literally just storing your files on Amazon’s, Google’s or Microsoft’s computer, instead of your own.

It is kind of like entrusting a neighbour with your important files and information, if your house floods or burns down, you know that your files are safe with your neighbour. Of course if it is his house that burns down or floods, you lose them all. You’re also banking on the fact that your neighbour will always be in when you need those files, if not, you just have to wait or go without. Finally, and perhaps most importantly, you are placing a lot of trust in your neighbour – do you trust him with all your files and secrets? Do you trust anyone that much? For those thinking this is Amazon, Google, Microsoft and Apple, large and trustworthy companies, see our next article on customer phone tracking by Google and Apple.

Not only is using the Cloud placing a lot of trust in a company to safe guard your files, but you are also relying on them to always grant you access to them. Should they ever suspend or remove your account, for whatever reason, your files are gone.

Affordable Web Hosting

Is this any different to website hosting? In many ways, no. However there are huge differences between trusting a company (web host or otherwise) with your website files, and trusting them with your business/personal files and documents.

The best option is to be careful what information you hand over, and always store a local copy too, so that when the internet or the Cloud is down, you still have access to your stuff. But predictably that isn’t what the Cloud Computing vendors want.

Cloud Computing is big business, worth £40 billion last year alone, and rising. For that reason many of these companies want an all or nothing approach, where the customer stores everything in the Cloud and has little or no reliance on local storage. Google’s Chrome OS  exemplifies this; Google’s forthcoming operating system will not have local storage, Any files ‘saved’ on Chrome OS will actually be saved on to Google Cloud Servers.

The 21st Century has introduced new ways for consumers to consume products, from listening to music, right through to reading books and magazines. It should be a golden age, but all too often with each great leap forward in technology, the rights of the consumer seem to take a bit of a leap backwards.

Wasn’t Radio Better?

Spotify has cut the number of times it’s free listeners can listen to a single song – to just five times. That’s right, your favourite song may be played on the radio umpteen times a day, but on Spotify you have five plays – EVER. After that you either pay for a premium account – or turn on the radio.

Far from being the new way to listen to music, your own personalised radio station playing the tracks that you like and allowing easier purchase of your favourite tracks, Spotify is fast becoming like every other 21st Century game changing idea, hobbled by the very people it could have saved. Ironically, these are the same people complaining that when customers are offered the choice of paying and getting less than they used to, or not paying, that some customers are not paying.

The music industry, long criticised for dragging its feet in the digital age, has begun to catch up of late. Removing DRM from digital music, which had meant that songs were effectively rented, rather than purchased, and allowing many more music download services. Spotify, and other streaming services were seen as a breath of fresh air, competition for illegal downloads and a more modern, personalised radio, that allowed users to avoid the 15 Rihanna songs played daily on the radio, and listen to their own choice of music. Surely the way forward?

Not so for the music companies, who see it as giving away music for free, which oddly is not how they see standard radio. New music takes a while to appear on Spotify after release sometimes a month or two, again not like radio which plays songs before release, and some music doesn’t appear at all. No, the music industry doesn’t like streaming services at all.

BBC News – Warner retreats from free music streaming

Warner chief executive Edgar Bronfman Jr said: “Free streaming services are clearly not net positive for the industry and as far as Warner Music is concerned will not be licensed.

“The ‘get all your music you want for free, and then maybe with a few bells and whistles we can move you to a premium price’ strategy is not the kind of approach to business that we will be supporting in the future.”

Bizarrely, rather than champion the 21st Century model of a personalised radio station and the positives it could bring to the industry, such as the captive audience, the reams of listening and purchasing data, the music companies seem to go out of their way to destroy it. In an age where anyone with a computer can get their music for free, it does seem self destructive.

Money For Old Rope

The publishing industry also seems intent on following this path to destruction. Rather than viewing the e-reader or the tablet PC as heralding in a new age of reading, and a rejuvanation of the publishing industry not seen since the launch of Amazon, the publishers seem to view them with suspicion; or worse, like the movie industry before them with DVD and Blu-Ray, a way of taking the consumer for even more money.

Not only do e-books cost the same as printed, cover illustrated, truck delivered and warehouse stored, paper books (and sometimes even more), they also come with more restrictions, and less rights (they cannot be lent out, or sold on), they are effectively rented and are able to be taken back at any time, as Amazon demonstrated with the infamous 1984 debacle.

Not surprisingly the publishing industry, like the music and movie industry before it, are seeing a sharp rise in pirated products.

Thousands of Google Email users were given a rude awakening this week when Google accidentally reset their accounts. Initially it was thought as many as 500,000 of Gmail users were affected, however Google later revised this to about 40,000 of its 200 million users. But how can you protect yourself against this? 

Bleak Outlook

Either way, it was no fun for those who have lost years of emails, although Google has begun restoring them, apparently.

Just a decade ago, most people used an email client such as Netscape Mail, Outlook or Outlook Express, although the likes of Hotmail and Yahoo existed back then, up until Google came along with their Gmail and 2GB inboxes, the storage space was quite limited and so few used web based email as their only way to access email, usually using a email client to store their emails offline.

Recent years has seen a huge shift in how people access their email, huge inbox storage means many leave all their emails online, only ever accessing them through their browser. The all dominant Outlook/Outlook Express email clients now only account for 35% of the market share, with the likes of web based Yahoo! Hotmail and Gmail making up another 35% and rising.

Technically, storing your emails only in your email client is the riskiest option, a hard drive failure or stolen PC could lead to you losing all those irreplaceable holiday or baby pictures you were sent by email. However as Gmail users found out this week, trusting all your email to a third party can just as easily leave you staring at an empty inbox, wishing you’d backed up.

The Cloud

Luckily the answer is simple, use both methods, wherever possible, and this applies to our customers using our WebMail system too. In your email client’s settings ensure that ‘Leave messages on server‘ is ticked. That way a copy of every email will be stored on the server (a.k.a. the Cloud) so you will always have two copies, at least. If you use one of the big three, Yahoo! Hotmail or Gmail, you should have enough space for years, but if you find you’re running out of space just change the settings to a time limit so that the messages are left on the server for 90 days, just make sure that whatever time limit you choose gives enough time to do your regular back ups, just in case.

Which of course brings us to the most important and best way of saving your data, backing it up. However you do it, make sure you back up your PC regularly, otherwise you could lose everything, and not just emails.