Mozilla man blasts Apple and Google for HTML5 abuse

Mozilla open source evangelist Chris Blizzard has unloaded on both Apple and Google for abusing the HTML5 moniker, confusing netizens everywhere, and undermining the slow march towards truly open web standards.

Blizzard is so peeved at Apple and Google that he even goes so far as to lavish praise on Microsoft for its belated embrace of open standards.

Like so many others among the browserati, Blizzard is fuming over Apple’s new “HTML Showcase” site. The site purports to demonstrate Apple’s love for web standards, but in the end, it does much the opposite.

“These web standards are open, reliable, highly secure, and efficient,” the site says. “The demos below show how the latest version of Apple’s Safari web browser, new Macs, and new Apple mobile devices all support the capabilities of HTML5, CSS3, and JavaScript.” But then it gives the impression that Apple is the only browser maker backing such standards.

The site goes on to say that “not all browsers offer this support.” Which is true. But today’s Chrome, Firefox, and Opera do offer extensive support for the same standards, and Apple has barred these — and all other non-Apple browsers — from accessing the demos:


Apple pretends other browsers don’t like HTML5

Echoing Opera’s Haavard Moen, Blizzard rips Steve Jobs Jobs and cult for its double-dealing, accusing the company of giving the false impression that only Safari has embraced open standards. “That’s right,” Blizzard writes, in describing the screenshot above. “If you’re not on Safari, then Fuck You. Aside from the incendiary language I’ve used to help you understand how it feels the real underlying message here is that if you don’t have access to Safari then you must not have access to HTML5. Wait, only Safari supports HTML5??

“Nope, lots of browsers do. A huge percentage of the world does have access to standards like HTML5.” And he points to a site that details HTML5 support built into Firefox, Chrome, and Safari.

Blizzard accuses Apple of commandeering HTML5 to suit its own agenda. “Basically they are saying internally ‘omg, no one thinks we support html5, we need to prove them otherwise! We’ll put up tests! Demos! The world will then know and we can go back to being perceived as actually leading the WebKit project which is also made of puppies and rainbows!’” he writes.

“So you end up with sites like this. Sites that entirely miss the point of the web, interoperability, standards and html5. The demos that they put up are just filled with stuff that Apple made up, aren’t part of HTML5 and are only now getting to the standards process.”

Part of the problem, Blizzard says, is that so many others have already applied the HTML5 moniker to so much more than HTML5. Apple’s simply following the trend, shoving things like CSS under the HTML5 umbrella. And here, Blizzard lays much of the blame on Google, who first took hold of the HTML5 name at its annual developer conference in the spring of last year.

“The big problem is that html5 has come to mean a lot of things, mostly thanks to Google. They’ve basically been riding that and flogging it and making it their own. (That and performance — simple, great marketing messaging. I appreciate it, even if the dishonesty of it makes my blood boil),” Blizzard says, referring to Google’s constantly claiming that Chrome is the fastest thing on the planet.

Google, it seems, is the real villain of his piece. “It’s a shame that the main victim here turns out to be Apple, given that the king of these tactics is Google, but hey, Apple managed to come out with something that was so brash and misleading it deserves a good tear-down,” Blizzard writes.

In an aside, he claims that at this year’s Google I/O developer conference, Mountain View “managed to take Native Client and the Chrome Store and make it all sound like it was part of html5.” And he has a point. This spring, at Google I/O, the company certainly nudged the open web forward in open sourcing its VP8 video codec under a royalty-free license. But it also dropped Native Client and the just announced Chrome App Store — two technologies tied to Google’s Chrome browser — into its sweeping discussion of HTML5 as the future of the web.

With Native Client, Google is actually bypassing the standard web stack, encouraging developers to build native code applications that run in a plug-in currently offered only by Chrome. And the Chrome App Store takes web applications into Apple iPhone store territory. The day of Google’s announcement, Mozilla’s Jay Sullivan called for the net to embrace an Open Web App Store.

“Web developers are expressing interest in an app store model for the Web that would enable them to get paid for their efforts without having to abandon Web development in exchange for proprietary silos, each with their own programming language and SDK, variable and sometimes opaque review processes, and limited reach,” Sullivan said in a blog post.

“Supporting the needs of Web developers in their efforts to develop websites and apps that aren’t bound to a specific browser and work across the Web is core to Mozilla’s public benefit mission.”

But even when it comes to the open standards, Blizzard says, Apple and Google are missing the point. It’s telling that of all the browser-makers out there, Blizzard reserves his praise for, um, Microsoft. “The most important aspect of HTML5 isn’t the new stuff like video and canvas (which Safari and Firefox have both been shipping for years). It’s actually the honest-to-god promise of interoperability,” he writes.

“Even stodgy old Microsoft, who has been doing their best to hold back the web for nearly a decade, understands this and you’ll see it throughout their marketing for IE9. (Their marketing phrase is ’same markup’ – watch for it and you’ll see it everywhere in their messaging). The idea that the same markup, even with mistakes, will be rendered exactly the same. HTML5 represents the chance for browsers to work together and find common ground.”

Apple is actually working against this mission. And in its own way, Blizzard says, Google is too. ®

Deciphering Google’s Wi-Fi headache (FAQ)

How did Google’s Wi-Fi spying debacle get to this point?

As Google prepares to defend itself against allegations of Wi-Fi spying, it has said very little about exactly what kind of personal data it gathered as part of its Street View project. Last week, Google also declined to provide executives willing to speak on the record about how one of the most monumental oversights in its history occurred: the inadvertent gathering of “payload” data by Wi-Fi sniffers mapping hotspots while recording street scenes for Google Street View.

But Google finally did confirm a few additional details about the type of scanning procedure it used as well as the nature of the code first written by Google engineers back in 2006. It first took responsibility for the gaffe–which only came to light after detailed inquiries from German authorities–in a blog post on May 14, and ever since then, Google critics have delighted at the opportunity the incident has provided, with lawsuits and Congressional inquiries pending.

Let’s take a look at what Google has said and some of the technology issues in question to get some more perspective on Google’s Wi-Fi scanning problem.

What data does Google have?
Google admitted on May 14 that it had been “mistakenly collecting samples of payload data from open (i.e. non-password-protected) Wi-Fi networks” for three years. Payload data is distinct from a “header,” which contains mostly benign information about the network itself: The payload is the actual data that is being transmitted over the network.

That sounds bad. Theoretically, it means that a Street View car stopped at a red light outside a coffee shop could have been sniffing its unsecured wireless access point and collecting data as it traveled over that unsecured network.

However, Google’s store of personal data might not be quite the treasure trove it may seem. Data sent back and forth between encrypted Web sites (password logins, online banking, credit-card transactions, or anything with https:// in the URL) would not be collected. Mobile workers signed into VPNs would also not be affected.

In addition, it’s not totally clear how much data Google would be able to capture with a Street View car moving at about 25 miles per hour along the streets of cities and towns around the world. Google said the data was “fragmented,” implying that piecing together any coherent image from that data would be difficult.

A company with the algorithmic and computing resources of Google could theoretically make some sense of the 600GBs of fragmented data collected over the last three years. Google already knows a great deal about your online life if you’re one of the two-thirds of Americans who regularly use its search engine, but data willingly provided to the company is different than data snatched out of thin air.

How did Google get the data?
Google confirmed it was using “passive” scanning techniques to discover Wi-Fi hotspots. That means there was the wireless equivalent of a big ear on the Street View cars that listened for any and all wireless signals. There’s nothing inherently wrong with passive scanning, but most passive scanners are set to not record payload data.

Google Street View carGoogle Street View cars mapped Wi-Fi hotspots in addition to taking pictures: but went a little too far

(Credit: Google)

To avoid any possibility of collecting payload data, some other wireless mapping companies, such as Skyhook (which has gotten no shortage of free publicity from Google’s screwup) use active scanning. This means Skyhook’s scanning equipment sends out a probe signal to determine whether any access points are in range, and access points recognize that signal and return their own message that basically says “here I am, here’s how to find me, and here’s how fast I can send you the Internet.” This is also how your computer or phone finds an available Wi-Fi network.

Active scanning is said to scale better, but passive scanning is more comprehensive and can’t be detected by the network access point.

Scanning public Wi-Fi networks has been a hobby for wireless enthusiasts and criminal hackers for years. Back in the days when Wi-Fi was just getting off the ground, “wardrivers” would locate and map public hotspots as a service, while those bent on criminal activity could do the same thing to steal data or borrow a network to conduct something illegal.

All other issues aside, the incident is yet another reminder that operating an unsecured wireless access point is like leaving your front door wide open with your jewelry on the doormat.

How could Google have let this happen?
We don’t really know.

Google confirmed it uses the open-source Kismet wireless scanning software as the base of its Wi-Fi mapping program. But additional code was written by Google engineers to discard any encrypted payload data captured as part of the scanning, Google said Friday.

That additional code is what is giving Google executives a headache. Without having any inside information, Lauren Weinstein, a longtime networking expert and co-founder of People for Internet Responsibility, believes this is the heart of the debacle: Someone at Google forgot to modify the software before it left a testing environment and entered a production one.

Inside the friendly confines of the Googleplex, logging all publicly available wireless data–including payload data–would be a normal way to test whether the system will function normally as data streams into the application, Weinstein said. “You want to make sure you’re not going to crash things. When you’re in your own environment, it’s your data; you can do what you want with it,” he said.

And discarding the encrypted code makes sense in that environment, because the encrypted code is recorded as gibberish that can’t be used to run network diagnostics.

However, if this was what happened, code should not have been allowed out of the labs without modifying it to dump all data gathered, not just encrypted data. “A procedural breakdown of this sort shouldn’t occur,” Weinstein said.

Was it really a simple mistake?
Your answer to that question depends on whether you trust Google.

Those who follow the Internet industry have been noticing a troubling trend over the past several years: one in which Internet companies push the boundaries of user privacy and data collection and apologize once they’re found out or the backlash can’t be ignored, only to start pushing once again after the hubbub dies down.

Likewise, Google has been willing to push in areas of law that haven’t necessarily anticipated the effects of the Internet and digital technology, such as it did when it decided to scan copyright-protected books under the belief it had the fair-use right to do so, rights that in that situation are not explicitly granted nor explicitly barred under copyright law.

It’s not illegal to inadvertently capture public wireless data under federal electronic privacy laws, but it is illegal to intentionally do so. All of Google’s public statements to this point have characterized the data gathering process as accidental. The developer of Kismet appeared to find such a basic error entirely plausible and human, and posted a playfully chastising blog item to that effect last week, pointing out how easy it would have been to change the code to make sure the software didn’t log payload data.

But as the late Ronald Reagan liked to say, “trust, but verify.” Google could go a long way toward clearing up any confusion by publishing a much more detailed technical explanation of how this came to be, and by publicly allowing a third party to review the code and data as promised in its May 14 blog post.

Most of this will probably come out in court hearings and congressional testimony anyway. Until then, some will think Google looks like it has something to hide.

BBC One HD gets thumbs up

One complaint that viewers of high definition television have, is the lack of a simultaneous BBC One in HD, but is seems that all of that is about to change.

According to the head of BBC HD, Danielle Nagler, viewers have been telling the BBC that they want more BBC content in HD and they have apparently listened to them.

It seems that the flagship channel BBC One will be broadcast in HD on BSkyB, Freesat, Freeview and Virgin Media, while BBC HD will have its hours extended from nine to twelve hours per day, although it will still be used as a showcase for BBC content.

The launch of BBC One HD is planned for sometime during the autumn of this year.

Story link: BBC One HD gets thumbs up

Google Pushes Chrome Browser for Linux, Mac

For years Microsoft’s Internet Explorer dominated the browser market, but upstarts like Firefox, Opera and Apple’s Safari helped change that with faster performance and new features that attracted users.

The newest browser competitor, Google’s Chrome, has also been making headway since its release in 2008, though the search giant has been relatively slow to support the Mac and Linux platforms. Datamation reports on what Google is doing to win over Mac and Linux users.

Google’s Chrome 5 Web browser is now available as a stable release for Mac and Linux, extending the availability of a stable version of the service to the three major operating systems.

The first stable release for Mac and Linux users comes after nearly a year of development in the dev and beta channels of Google (NASDAQ: GOOG) Chrome. The first versions of Chrome for Linux and Mac debuted in June 2009 and had only limited functionality. In contrast, Google has been offering Windows builds ever since the beginning of the Chrome effort in September 2008.

In addition to the availability for Mac and Linux stable users, Chrome 5 provides a number of feature and performance improvements to users on all supported platforms. Chrome 5 development began with the dev-channel version in February of this year. Then Chrome 5 beta debuted in May, boasting JavaScript performance gains.

Read the full story at Datamation

Hotmail Re-Heated

Microsoft’s (Nasdaq: MSFT) Hotmail has about as many users as the Earth has Americans, but recently the company noticed that the service’s design and feature set was beginning to look pretty stale. Some of its features actually hadn’t been touched in years, and in that time, rival services like Yahoo (Nasdaq: YHOO) and Gmail have been continuously revamping their message centers, and their user volumes have grown accordingly, especially Google’s.

So this summer, Hotmailers will get all sorts of new toys. There’ll be a new sorting feature and a window for sending status updates directly from the email app. You’ll get new ways to clean up the inbox, including ways to automatically delete marketing items that aren’t spam but are still stuff you don’t want to read.

Then there’s this thing called “Active View.” If you get an email with a bunch of photos in it, you can automatically view them as a slideshow instead of downloading them via the browser. Silverlight required.

Hotmail will also have access to Skydrive, where you’ll be able to store documents. Skydrive will also let you send massive photo sets — up to 200 — by uploading them to Skydrive and then sending a link.

Google Street View’s Wandering WiFi Eye

To create its Street View service, Google (Nasdaq: GOOG) sends fleets of cars to drive around cities all over the world and take pictures with the 360-degree cameras they have strapped to their roofs. The result is many things to many people: a convenient source of information, a depressing reminder that your home is ugly, an enduring memento of that time you ducked into an alley and thought nobody was looking, etc.

Even though Google’s cars stay on public roads, some also consider Street View a huge invasion of privacy. Before last week, those people might have thought they were being violated only photographically, but it turns out that devices inside some of those Google vehicles were spying on WiFi networks as well.

According to the New York Times, Google invited data protection expert Johannes Caspar to its German headquarters to check out the vehicles it uses for Street View. The service was already under the glare of European privacy advocates for its habit of staring at people’s houses, but Caspar pulled on a thread that eventually revealed something more troubling. Devices inside those Street View cars were actually sniffing unprotected WiFi networks in the neighborhoods they drove through and saving some of the information — what sites were visited, what was done there, etc. So far, Google has admitted that it happened in Germany and Ireland, but it was a mistake, they didn’t mean to do it, and whatever data was collected is being erased.

But Google’s already made something of a target of itself in Europe over privacy issues, and this development just threw another bucket of gasoline on the fire. Officials in Germany, Czech Republic, Italy and the UK are all probing the matter independently, and EU Justice Commissioner Viviane Reding gave Google her own personal stink-eye.

Stateside, privacy groups have asked the FTC whether it plans to do anything about this, so there may eventually be some action in the U.S., but there’s clearly a difference between the way American officials and European officials are reacting to this. Carl Howe at the Yankee Group told us, “The Europeans think we’re crazy for being so lax about privacy, and we see them as crazy because they get all upset over privacy issues.”

But how private is an open WiFi network, anyway? That’s debatable. Google didn’t go busting down any password barriers — not even weak ones. Logging into someone else’s unprotected WiFi without permission is a low and intrusive thing to do, but consider that these are wireless signals being broadcast into public space with no attempt made to block unauthorized users. Just because nobody should snoop doesn’t mean nobody will.

Encrypting your WiFi network is a lot like shutting your blinds. It’s up to you — but if you don’t do it, you’re relying on people to not be rude, voyeuristic and generally awful, which is a losing bet, so don’t be too shocked if you find out you’ve been gawked at. And once Google gawks at you, it’s not easy to be ungawked.

The Million Dollar Laptop Nobody Can Have

The Bugatti Veyron, one of the world’s fastest production cars. 11.5 seconds of a SuperBowl TV ad. A cardboard box in Manhattan. The Luvaglio luxury laptop. All of these items have one thing in common: their one million dollar price tag.

Back in 2007, a previously unheard of company started proclaiming the news of their marvelous product. It was intended to be something more special, more unique than just a standard fare laptop with jewels on it. An air of exclusivity, unmatched design, and perhaps hidden machine guns or an oil slick seemed to await the first brave soul with a million bucks under the couch cushion.

The company’s mantra makes you feel like you’ll be part of a billionaire’s secret club.

“We’ve created our own path – our creations, our designs, our attention to detail are like nothing you’ve experienced before.”

“We’re not interested in ‘mass production’ or designing ‘entry level products’ – we leave that to others.”

“We guarantee that everything we do will exceed expectations.”

“We create and hand make the very best.”

And that’s where the information ends. A pretty light sales pitch for a million dollar product to say the least. Evidently you need a “password” to continue, or you can view the address of their corporate offices in England.

A Luvaglio press release sheds some light on a little more about the laptop & it’s specs:

  • Solid State storage
  • Blu-ray drive
  • Built-in USB memory stick & MP3 player
  • Integrated screen cleaning
  • Jewel-encrusted power button
  • Motorized storage box (from video)

While SSD’s were still very new in 2007 and an integrated screen cleaning system seemed a bit far fetched, nothing seemed truly out of the ordinary here. We can only assume that the folks at Luvaglio were aiming for more design than technology in the exclusiveness of their product.

Wait a minute…

Around the time that the Luvaglio was major press, U.K. magazine PC Pro did some investigation of their own into Luvaglio. They managed to get the Luvaglio CEO on the phone and have a vague conversation about availability and production, with the types of answers that sound all to familiar from someone who doesn’t have much to say. After being deflected to an e-mail address for a PR person who never responded, the blokes at PC Pro went down to Luvaglio’s headquarters only to find a small townhouse with nobody home.

To date, there have been no reports of purchases of the Luvaglio million dollar laptop, no further press releases or information from the company, no word of any kind really. After the buzz died down in April-May of 2007, nothing seems to have been heard from Luvaglio save for their ever present, super secretive, invitation-only website.

Whether Luvaglio is a company of empty promises or perhaps the conspirers of an elaborate scam: it seems that the million dollar laptop will never meet the light of day.

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Share Your Design Concepts With the World

You’ve got a brand new design concept for your big important website. You think it looks awesome… and you’re ready to unveil it to the world. Yet, something in the back of your mind says that in order to really make this design perfect: you’re going to want to test it first. After all, a lot of people are going to see this new design.

Wouldn’t it be nice if you could get feedback from some other professionals before you release it to the world ? Hell yes!

That’s why the project Concept Feedback caught my attention. It allows you to share your concepts with the world (more specifically: the ConceptFeedback.com community – which now exceeds 1500 users).

To be honest, this is quite possibly the easiest way to get professional (not just some kid in his pajamas) feedback for your new design concepts.

I had a chance to catch up with Andrew, founder of Concept Feedback, to learn more about the project, his vision and business strategy.

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